The Surest Way to Success Is to Not Care So Much
Relax your willful left brain and your intuitive right brain will unleash your creative potential
[The following is an edited excerpt from my book “The Slacker and the Go-Getter: Unlock Your Higher Nature by Balancing the Two Halves of Your Mind.”]
Iain McGilchrist, in his book “The Master and His Emissary,” has expertly described the essential difference between the two halves of the brain, which can be thought of as the processors of two distinct modes of conscious experience:
Left Brain Mode = Focused, Goal-Oriented Attention
Right Brain Mode = Broadly Receptive Awareness
Obviously, the brain needs both modes to operate effectively, yet McGilchrist points out that the modern world overwhelmingly produces adult humans who are left-brain dominant.
We are thus more likely to focus on those aspects of reality that are important to the fulfillment of our desires, and less likely to be truly attentive to the moment as it presents itself, irrespective of what we want from it.
How then to achieve the desired balance between focused attention (“go-getter” mode) and receptive awareness (unassuming “slacker” mode)? In other words, how can we train ourselves to use the whole of our brains more consistently?
One of the main stumbling blocks is that we rarely make a conscious attempt to find a combination or balance of these two modes of mental activity, which is why we have so much trouble being truly creative. The concepts of “relaxed go-getter” and “purposeful slacker” may strike us as so paradoxical as to be nonsensical.
Perhaps this is why the activity of our workdays always seems a little too goal-directed, and the moments of relaxation during our time off a little too aimless. We have learned to rigidly separate these two modes of being, convinced that our hours of work require an elimination of fun in order to be productive, and that our time off should be entirely non-productive in order to be fun.
Even if we do make the attempt to combine the two modes, our minds have trouble letting go of the stifling confinement of our own mental categories.
If we try to write a song during our time off, we immediately start worrying about whether or not it will be any good, as if a critical boss is supervising our efforts and demanding that the song be great. Before we even start, we have decided that this activity is serious and purposeful, and therefore falls under the category of “work.” This decision switches our brains over to work mode.
We narrow our mental focus, determined to only allow “good” song ideas to enter our head. The result is a restriction of the unbounded sense of play required for any truly creative work to be done.
Alternately, we might get stuck in the playful mode of the slacker. We goof off on the guitar, strumming out spontaneous riffs and belting out lyrical accompaniment with abandon, but our desire to goof off prevents us from engaging in any persistent and intentional refinement or development of our riffs and lyrics, for our sense of fun won’t allow anything that smacks of purposeful striving.
How then to bring together these two modes of being, combining intention with spontaneity, so that work and play mingle into a harmoniously creative whole?
Visualizing the Whole
It might help to bring the right brain into play again by utilizing one of its key strengths: visualization. Let us imagine the reality of inner experience in spatial terms.
If your mind habitually resides in slacker mode, your attention tends to hop playfully across the surface of your mind, perhaps alighting at one moment on a captivating idea, then sliding across with a sigh into a nostalgic memory, then taking into awareness the next instant something interesting which enters your field of vision.
There’s a lot of variety in this mode, but little in the way of penetrating insight, due to the fact that the mind never seems to focus on any one thing for very long — lots of breadth here, but little depth, as if reality were a two-dimensional surface, quite broad, but paper-thin.
Alternatively, you might be a go-getter type, your mind always fixed on the goal you’re working towards. Your attention hones in on this goal, effectively blocking those emotions, thoughts, and perceptions which might become distractions.
Like a spear, this willful mode of being penetrates the surface and moves directly towards the goal. This is great if your goal is to learn how to type or to improve your golf swing, but it can become a liability if your goal requires access to novel, creative ideas which you might not see due to your laser-like focus.
The situation here is exactly the opposite of the slacker mindset: lots of time spent focused on a particular problem, which allows for the possibility of depth and the ability to penetrate into the nature of the problem, but little connection to other areas of experience and imagination which might provide the solution you seek.
The aim, then, is to combine the breadth of the slacker’s surface meanderings with the depth and direction of the go-getter’s spear thrust — to take advantage of the whole, three-dimensional realm of the mind.
Are You a Go-Getter or a Slacker?
The first step in achieving this is to recognize which one of these modes defines your habitual mindset. Are you a natural slacker or a dyed-in-the-wool go-getter?
Once you know who you are, you can begin the practice of consistently reaching out to develop the opposite mode. The resulting combination of the two modes will be inherently creative.
For example, if you are temperamentally a focused go-getter and want to develop your creativity, you must learn to relax your habitual concentration while still maintaining a center of attention on the task at hand, thereby loosening and expanding the scope of your mind and consciously accessing a broader range of creative possibilities. True, some of these possibilities will be more relevant to the task than others, but at least they will be paid attention to and checked for relevance rather than ignored.
It’s not much different than what happens when you give up trying to solve a problem after tackling it for hours, and the solution suddenly comes to you while brushing your teeth. During the brushing, your mind remained unconsciously centered on the problem, even though you’d let go of your consciously tight focus. This unconsciously “loose focus” is what allowed the creative solution to appear in your mind.
All we’re trying to do now is to make this a conscious rather than an unconscious process. This is a centering rather than a restriction of attention — not tunnel vision, but an engagement with the process of creation that combines the determination of the go-getter with the inclusive freedom of the slacker.
If your natural mental temperament is that of the slacker, your problem is not tightness of focus, but rather the inability to keep your mind centered on one thing over an extended period of time.
Your challenge is one of commitment — of finding the strength and confidence of purpose to continually draw your attention back to your central goal when it is pulled this way and that by the varied distractions of your inner and outer world.
The trick is to manage this centering of attention without sacrificing your habitually open and receptive mentality. If you succeed, you will find that by simply maintaining your center of attention on the task over time, you will penetrate deeper into any creative problems which arise and gain surprising insights into possible solutions, while still enjoying the playful surprises which your open mind is always eager to include.
Happy creating!
