Creative Thinking
Creative Thinking The imagination is literally the workshop wherein are fashioned all plans created by man. —NAPOLEON HILL CREATIVE THINKERS rule the world! They are continually seeking faster, better, and easier ways to accomplish goals that are important to other people. They practice the CANEI principle, which stands for “Continuous and Never-Ending Improvement.” They are responsible for all of the great breakthroughs, innovations, and progress in human history. They know that sometimes one good idea is all it takes to change the course of a business or an individual life. Mechanical Thinking Mechanical thinking, on the other hand, tends to be rigid and inflexible. It is “my way or the highway.” Mechanical thinking is rooted in fears of failure or making a mistake and losing time, money, or both. It is triggered by fears of criticism or disapproval, trying something that doesn’t work. Poor thinkers think in terms of black and white rather than shades of grey. They think in extremes of yes versus no, up versus down. They think there is only one way when there are usually many ways. In the face of change and confrontation, they develop psychosclerosis, which is defined as a “hardening of the attitudes.” They are victims of “homeostasis,” a striving for constancy. They are stuck in their comfort zones. They resent and fear anything new or different, even an improvement in conditions. But this is not for you. You Are a Potential Genius You have more creative potential than you could use in a hundred lifetimes. The more of your creative ability you use, the more you can use. You actually become more creative each time you come up with something new. It is said that every child is born a genius, and this means you, throughout your lifetime. It turns out that creativity is the single best indicator or predictor of success in life and in work. The more creative you are, the more and better ideas you will come up with to improve your life, work, and everything around you. One good idea can be enough to change the entire direction of your life. How do you recognize creativity? Creative people are curious. They ask a lot of questions and are never satisfied. In fact, you can become more creative just by asking more questions about the things going on around you and not being content with superficial answers. Genius Throughout the Ages There are many studies of the qualities of geniuses throughout the ages. The first fact they discovered was that intelligence was not a matter of IQ or academic qualifications. Many so-calledgeniuses had average or slightly above-average intelligence. Genius or excellent thinking was instead more a matter of attitude and approach toward the inevitable challenges of life. It appears that geniuses develop three qualities over time: Keep an Open Mind First, they approach every problem or situation with an open mind, almost a childlike attitude of exploration and discovery. The more open your mind is to completely new and different approaches to any situation in your life, the more likely it is that you are going to get insights and ideas that move you out of your comfort zone—that enable you to think outside the box. Theycontinually ask “Why?” and “Why not?” and “What if?” Second, geniuses carefully consider every aspect of a problem, refusing to jump to conclusions, gathering more information to validate their tentative conclusions at each stage. They avoid a rush to judgment. They are always open to the possibility that they could be wrong, or that their idea is no good. The Best Solution Albert Einstein was once asked, “If there was a major emergency or potential disaster that was going to destroy the earth in 60 minutes, and you were asked to find a solution, what would you do?” Einstein replied, “I would spend the first 59 minutes gathering information, and the last minute solving the problem in the best possible way.” In business today, especially in new product development, the more time you spend working closely with customers to be sure that your new product or service idea is exactly what they want, need, and are willing to pay for, the more likely it is that you will be successful in a fast-changing and highly competitive market. The Systematic Approach Third, geniuses of all kinds use a systematic approach to problem solving and decision making. Accomplished mathematicians, physicists, doctors, mechanics, and people in other professions do not throw themselves at a problem like a dog chasing a passing car. Rather, they follow a carefullydesigned checklist and work their way through a problem, step by step, toward a conclusion. Atul Gawande, in his book The Checklist Manifesto, tells the story of two investment experts, both successful, but one far more successful than the other. It turned out that they both had many years of experience in evaluating and making substantial investments for themselves and their clients. But the more successful adviser had developed a checklist of essential questions to ask and tests to apply to an investment proposal before making a decision. The other adviser used many of the same techniques and tactics to appraise an investment, but he operated more from intuition and experience. As a result, he often lost money when he shouldn’t have. Here was the interesting point that Gawande made. The first adviser was consistently more successful than the second. But on various occasions, he made mistakes and lost money. The reason was invariably the same. He had neglected to follow his own checklist. He had missed one or two vital points in his list of important considerations. When he went back to following hischecklist meticulously, his investment record improved significantly. The Systematic Problem-Solving Method Here is a structured/unstructured way of problem solving and decision making developed by experts and think tanks over the years. I have synthesized the best ideas I have discovered into a single simple method that you can use for the rest of your career.
Increasing Your Resiliency
Increasing Your Resiliency Resilience is the ability an object has to return to its original form after being bent, stretched, or compressed. That’s the dictionary’s definition. In people, it’s the ability to readily recover from illness, depression, or adversity. In our lives, resilience specifically means being able to withstand setbacks, broken hearts and broken dreams, financial crisis, loss of loved ones, loss of enterprise, and loss of health. How would you ever handle it if you lost everything you had today? What would your next step be?How long would you be depressed and upset and angry? What would it take for you to pull yourself up and start all over again? How resilient are you? Could you handle it? Could you learn from all of your disappointments and start all over again? What would it take? Number one, it would take a lot of self-discipline. It would take a lot of positive self-talk to muster up the energy to begin again. It would take a lot of concentration to block out the noise and the clutter of all the negative voices trying to get through—your negative voices as well as the negativevoices of others around you. It would take a lot of discipline to balance the fear and anxiety with the knowledge that, if you did it once, you can do it all over again. It would also take a lot of self-reliance. Whether or not your losses had anything to do with you, your future success has everything to do with you. It would take a lot of self-reliance to avoid the entanglements of blame. What’s happened has happened. You would need to get on with your life and begin again. It would take a lot of faith. It would take a lot of faith and trust in God to move ahead. If you lost everything tomorrow, and you were gathering all the courage to try again, it would take a lot of self-appreciation. You need to know in your heart and mind that you have the skills, the talent, and the strength to do it one more time. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity, no matter how large or how small. Say you lose one of your biggest clients. This client accounts for over twenty-five percent of your gross revenues. Losing this client is going to hurt, financially and emotionally. The first thing you need to do is figure out why you lost this business. What role did you play? In what way are youresponsible? You can’t just rant and rave, yelling and screaming at everyone in the office. Even if it was the wrongdoing of someone else, you can’t behave like this because it’s not professional. You’ll lose the respect of your coworkers. And respect is hard to regain once you’ve lost it, whether it’s the respect of trusted colleagues or your valuable support people. You have to approach the situation rationally and figure out how to bounce back from your loss. You have to evaluate the situation and then begin a plan to recapture the lost business. Consider how you can increase your market share with other businesses. Maybe you can network with associates to bring in a similar client… or a larger one. You can’t sit back and dwell on what’s happened. You’ve got to get back into the marketplace and recapture what’s been taken from you. Perhaps your loss is a personal loss. Maybe you’ve recently been faced with the death of a loved one, a divorce, or the loss of a very special friendship. If your loss is a deeply personal one, you should approach the situation a little differently. You must be patient with yourself and giveyourself time to grieve, mourn, and regroup. The stages we go through in loss, be it death of a loved one, death of a relationship, or death of an enterprise, are beautifully defined in Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ book On Death and Dying. Whether the death is a literal one or a figurative one, the stages are the same: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And only by going through these stages and reaching acceptance can we rebound and begin again. It’s said that children are more resilient than adults. Why? Maybe it’s because they don’t evaluate their current situation based on past experiences. They approach losses in a fresh, new way each time. In their minds, they deal with loss much better than adults. Children who grow up in the unfortunate circumstances of poverty, abuse, or neglect and later become successful are known as dandelion children. If they can succeed and prosper amidst terrible conditions, they can grow anywhere. It’s important to be more like a dandelion child, to be able to grow and prosper and succeed despite our current conditions and losses… to be resilient. Cultivating a resilient character turns what others would call failure into success. A resilient person won’t give up. A resilient person will, in spite of all obstacles and set-backs, keep doing it until everything is back on track. In their book The Resilient Self, Steven and Sybil Wolin have studied resilience and have found seven key characteristics that comprise it. Number one: resilience requires insight. You need to develop the ability to ask yourself tough questions and be honest with your answers. If you had something to do with your loss, be honest and accept responsibility for it. Number two: resilience is independent. As a resilient person, you can count on yourself to bounce back into life. Number three: although resilience is independent, it’s also tied to others. The more people you are responsible for, the greater your motivation to begin again. Number four: resilience calls for initiative. You need to develop the ability to take charge of the situation or problem. You need to stand up and do whatever is necessary to recover. Number five: resilience has an element of creativity. With resilience, you are able to look at a situation and creatively determine the best
Goal Setting
Goal Setting SEVERAL SELF-MADE MILLIONAIRES, all of whom started with nothing and worked their way up, were having dinner at the home of one of their group. The conversation went back and forth about the various reasons for success and why it was that the people around this table had achieved so much when the average person achieves so little. Finally, the most successful of thegroup spoke up and asked, “What is success?” When they turned to him for his answer, he said, “Success is goals, and all else is commentary.” Turning Points Throughout your life, you will have a series of turning points. These are moments, insights, or experiences that can take a few seconds or a few months. But after one of these turning points, your life is never the same again. Sometimes you recognize one of these turning points when it takes place. In most cases, you only recognize that it was a turning point in retrospect. As you look back on your life, you often remember small things that happened to which you paid little attention, but the consequences of these events changed you in some way and had an influence on the person you are today. One of the major turning points in my life, and in the lives of most successful people, was my discovery of goals. If you want to be successful, you have to have goals. The Key to Riches It is not uncommon today for people to complain and even demonstrate in the streets about “the 1 percent versus the 99 percent” in our society in terms of income. But they’ve got it wrong. In reality, it should be “the 3 percent versus the 97 percent.” Only about 3 percent of people have clear, specific, written goals and plans that they work on each day. The other 97 percent have hopes, dreams, wishes, and fantasies, but not goals. And the great tragedy is that they don’t know the difference. Earn and Acquire Ten Times as Much As a result of reading many studies into those people with and without goals, I have found that the top 3 percent earn and acquire, over time, on average, ten times as much as the bottom 97 percent put together. Why is this? There are many reasons. A mantra of wealthy people is “Don’t lose money.” In terms of success, we could say that the corollary is “Don’t lose time.” The fact is that when you have clear, specific goals and clear plans to achieve those goals and you work on them every day, you save an enormous amount of time. You accomplish more in a few months or years than many people accomplish in a lifetime. By setting goals, you program your mental GPS, which then functions like a guided missile to move you directly toward the target you have aimed at, taking feedback from your target and making “course corrections” until you achieve your goal. As Thomas Carlyle wrote, “The person without goals makes no progress on even the smoothest road. The person with clear goals makes rapid progress on even the roughest road.” You have heard the saying “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” Develop the Big Three Perhaps the very best way for you to develop the “big three” of superior thinking—clarity, focus, and concentration—is for you to develop clear goals for every part of your life. Fully 95 percent of success is developing clarity in the first place. You must become completely clear about who you are—your strengths, your weaknesses, your special talents and abilities—and what you want to do with your life. Then you must focus single-mindedly on one thing at a time,without diversion or distraction. According to both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, the ability to focus on one thing at a time is more responsible for success in our fast-moving, turbulent times than any other mental ability. Finally, once you have decided who you are and what you want and have decided upon your point of focus, you must develop the discipline to concentrate single-mindedly on one thing at a time and stay with it until it is 100 percent complete. Goals enable you to develop the qualities of clarity, focus, and concentration much faster than anything else you could do or decide for your life. Goals are the best antidote to “fuzzy thinking,” which is probably more responsible for frustration and failure than any other factor. Minimize Distractions Because of rapid change and constant electronic interruptions—e-mail, texts, telephone calls, and social media—more and more people are developing a form of attention deficit disorder that makes it almost impossible for them to think clearly or to stay “on task.” They check their smartphones every time, are slaves to social media, and are continually chasing the “shiny objects” of immediate stimulus. Those who do not have goals are doomed forever to work for those who do. In life, you can either work to achieve your own goals or work to achieve the goals of someone else. Of course, the best of all is when you help your company to achieve its goals by achieving your own goals. The Impact of Change Perhaps the most important factor affecting your life today is the speed of change. In all of human history, we have never experienced the rate of change that we are enduring today—except for next month and next year and for the rest of our lives. Three main factors are accelerating the rate of change and causing us to feel out of control. Our very best plans are often invalidated, sometimes overnight, by a change in one of these three critical areas. 1) INFORMATION EXPLOSION The first factor driving change is the information and knowledge explosion. Information and new ideas are expanding, growing, increasing faster and faster. One new piece of knowledge, one new idea or insight, can upset or overturn an entire industry, causing failure and bankruptcy. More smart