Get More Done in Less Time By Getting 3800% Better at Creative Thinking
“I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking” – Albert Einstein
Picture the 6 year old version of yourself. How rational were your thoughts?
How rational were your hopes and dreams as your crayons coloured blue hair on your mom and the pet dog you didn’t have in the family portrait.
Why is it that there was a day where we were able to dream lofty visions of castles and cowboys, while today we are hard pressed to think about how to serve our customers better or make more money to live a more deliciously intentional lifestyle?
We see limitations as just that… limitations.
We used to see limitation as opportunity!
A stick could be a gun, a sword, or the start of a great tree fort.
So why is that we no longer value creativity… and why should we care now?
As a chiropractor there are dozens of reasons creative thinking can help you to live a more fulfilling life:
- Being able to attract more new patients
- More creative ways to communicate with your current clients and increase referrals and reviews
- How to reduce the expenses and create a more profitable business
- How to spend more time with your family
- How to take inexpensive trips and create a deeper family bond
- … how to take the time off practice for a family trip
- How to get more done in less time
- How to outsource/delegate the minutiae that take time away from the things that you love
- The ability to cast a wider net on the influence of your mission
- How to describe the colour blue to a blind person…
The list is inexhaustible!
Let’s look at how “science” tells the story of how we lost creativity in our society and more importantly what we can do to flex those muscles again.
In the Ted Talk, “Bring on the Learning Revolution” Ken Robinson states that the education system was built in the early 1900’s and there is little to show for a formal education system pre- industrialization.
The formal education was and still is, made to prepare children for the future world and how to thrive in its model, right?
But think about the kids going into schools today, these children will be retiring in the year 2065, give or take a few grinding years.
In such an evolving era, we may be living in Mars by then. With the advancement of quantum computing and the internet revolution these kids will be so poorly prepared for that future.
The school system is a linear model based on right or wrong, yes or no.
If you are right, your grades are good and you are going to get a better job. If you are wrong, you are less brilliant and possibly put on ADHD medication to pay better attention.
We are continually training children that they are not allowed to be wrong.
This I believe is where we went wrong as a society…. We made math and science mandatory, while art, drama and gym became optional and unrewarded.
We have been training our future generations that they are only brilliant if they are using the left sides of their brain and if they get questions wrong in class, they are publicly humiliated and receive bad grades.
Everybody is a Genius. But If You Judge a Fish by Its Ability to Climb a Tree, It Will Live Its Whole Life Believing that It is Stupid
How can we possibly then prepare the future generation for an unpredictable world AND not fuck them up later in life?
We need to teach them that taking risks and being wrong is encouraged. The more we fail, the closer we are to solutions and the more lessons we can learn. We need to encourage right side thinking as much as left side thinking.
“An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail” – Edwin Land
We need to train people the importance of shifting their perspectives and allowing them to continually believe they are creative!
And we need to shift our own perceptions in the meantime to teach ourselves that we too are creative beings. Sun Tzu has an amazing quote to begin the process of shifting our reality:
It’s not what we have, it is how we get creative with what we have been given. “There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard.
There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen.
There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet combinations of
them yield more flavours than can ever be tasted.” – Sun Tzu
Let’s take this further:
Creativity is just a muscle and we consciously choose whether to hit the gym and train that right brain or let it atrophy.
… I think in this example it’s true, if you don’t use it you lose it.
If we can make a 1% improvement each day, the law of compounds will turn this into a 3800% increase in creativity this year alone.
Start by asking more questions. Get curious about how things work and why people do what they do and the way you live your life and believe your beliefs.
Hell I’ve been thinking recently that smell must have an appearance to some degree because of how long the smell of bacon lingers in your kitchen.
James Altucher wrote on Quora about how to be more creative:
Get wrong. Aristotle was wrong all the time. And even Einstein was wrong (he missed quantum mechanics). And the Beatles had some bad songs. And Thomas Jefferson was wrong about the ethics of raping slaves.
Creativity starts with humility.
There’s a vast universe out there of things we don’t know. Being an explorer of that universe, standing up and saying, “I’m an explorer!” is step #1 in being a creator.
Let’s go into 2017 and ask the impossible questions, the questions that require an impossible answer.
Go explore. Create. And work on that 1% per day to live a more consciously intended life.
And of course there are some people out there who don’t want to seek out the answers on their own. There are some of us out there who just want the answers laid out for them and their hand held. I believe there’s nothing wrong with that.
If you don’t want to reinvent the wheel and just want someone who’s walked through the trenches to help you define your own journey from where you are to where you want to be, then reach out and grab our hand.
Click the button below to grab a free coaching strategy call with our team and let’s see if we can help you move even one step closer to your dreams.
