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Press Pause to Leap with Wonder and Rigor

John Johnson
Four4Soaring
Published in
5 min readApr 27, 2024
Photo by Jan Huber on Unsplash

I don’t know if you are anything like me, but I can hear a pattern repeated and etched upon my ear in certain seasons.

It is similar to when you buy a new car and suddenly see the same model, brand, and color everywhere, and you never even noticed them before. It is like that with me but with all manner of things.

This week, my brain’s recurring ‘record skip’ is about pausing. It’s like when you’re listening to a vinyl record and it suddenly gets stuck on a certain phrase, playing it over and over again. In my case, it’s the idea of pausing that keeps repeating in my mind.

It is about “slowing down to go fast,” regrouping and resetting.

I’m currently reading Natalie Nixon’s “The Creativity Leap” (Berrett-Koehler, 2020). It is a book about living in the constant tension of wonder and rigor to leap forward with creativity. In this book, Nixon recommends that we use her 3i Creativity Model as a tactical means of creativity.

The 3is are Inquiry, Improvisation, and Intuition.

At the beginning of her book, Nixon suggests something that ought to precede all that, and it popped out at me during one of these pattern recognition moments.

“Wonder requires space to do nothing. This may be a radical proposition in our times of…

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Four4Soaring
Four4Soaring

Published in Four4Soaring

Stories about the 4Ls to Live and Soar by : Light | Love | Leadership | Laughter

John Johnson
John Johnson

Written by John Johnson

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