Professor Wormbog had every beastie in his collection except one (Mayer, 1976). He had everything from A to Y: an askingforit, a blowfat-glowfish, a croonie, a diddly-dee, an errg, a fydolagump, and everything else up to the yalapappus. But he lacked the crucial Z, the zipperump-a-zoo. He therefore set out to find the missing zipperump-a-zoo and looked everywhere, including the most exotic places in the world. But the zipperump-a-zoo eluded him. Finally he gave up, came back home, and went to sleep, exhausted. As soon as he fell asleep, a whole tribe of zipperump-a-zoos emerged to party, right in his house. They had been there all the time, hiding. In asking in what exotic place they might be, he had neglected to ask whether they might be in the most obvious place of all, right in his own home. Because he had asked the wrong question, he emerged with the wrong answer.

This book represents, in a sense, a recounting of the tale of a search for my own zipperump-a-zoo (Sternberg, 2000b), the nature of the mind – of human intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, and how they interrelate. I have learned a crucial lesson from Professor Wormbog: You will never come up with the right answer if you ask the wrong question. I still have not figured out quite the right question, but that's fortunate because there is still hope for what's left of the second half of my career.