The Innovation Lab Of Your Mind
We all want to come up with better ideas. We all want to think up solutions that solve problems and improve life.
“New ideas won’t appear if you don’t have permission with yourself.” — Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO
Seeking revolutionary insights requires the habit of taking your knowledge & experiences of the world, randomly connecting them together in the connection machine that is your mind, and spitting out impactful ideas.
Those who spend their mental efforts attempting to cultivate their ability to make epiphanies are likely to be rewarded in every facet of life. We can intentionally prime our minds to provide more solutions to life’s problems and create changes that improve the world.
In Daniel Goleman’s book, Focus: The Hidden Driver Of Excellence, he says that unique ideas come about as a result of the unconscious problem-solving process of ‘Bottom-Up’ thinking.
“System one has massive computing power and operates constantly, purring away in quiet to solve our problems, surprising us with a sudden solution to complex pondering. Since it operates beyond the horizon of conscious awareness we are blind to its workings.” — Daniel Goleman on ‘Bottom Up Thinking’.
‘Bottom-Up’ focus ticks away while you’re sitting in the car, daydreaming into the clouds, walking the dogs, cooking for the family or staring onto the wall behind your computer.
This process is the cornerstone of the current ‘Knowledge Economy’. Companies and individuals in today’s ‘Knowledge Economy’, equipped with the tools of open source technology (physical & intellectual), are primarily focused on the creation of new product and service iterations and introductions. If anybody wishes to succeed in this kind of economy, they need to invest relatively large amounts of resources (time, money, effort) on optimizing this idea generation process.
This is why we need to personally ensure that our everyday habits and behaviours are geared around the art & science behind the innovation lab that is our brain.
Charlie Munger on his and Warren Buffet’s process:
“Warren and I do more reading and thinking and less doing than most people in business. We do that because we like that kind of life. But we’ve turned that quirk into a positive outcome for ourselves. We both insist on a lot of time being available almost every day to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. We read and think.”
The pillars of improving your innovation lab.
Have an area of focus
- Your thinking has to be relevantly orientated towards a specific industry, an area of application or field of study. This doesn’t mean to not look at other areas, but to do so with the intention of applying any learning to your area of focus.
Read
- Reading is weight-lifting for associative thought, it’s a simple formula of ‘Ideas In = Ideas Out’. The more you study other people’s ideas & thinking, the more likely you will make your own unique connections. Studies have shown that those that read frequently are likely to be more rational when decisions need to be made, use more information when making decisions, and using more complex and systems orientated ideas and concepts to interpret the world. Don’t read to recite, read to add to the stock of possible ideas in your minds. (1)
Listen
- To Yourself: Mindfulness gives you the greatest chance of having a clear thought, rid of all the white noise of a cluttered mind. Allowing you to be less attached to your current ideas and more able to make connections between different thoughts.
- To Others: Other people’s thoughts are the greatest sources for your innovation lab’s research. Isn’t that all a new idea is? A unique combination of already existing ideas? According to Scientific America, “Decades of research by organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and demographers show that socially diverse groups (that is, those with a diversity of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation) are more innovative than homogeneous groups.”
Set aside ‘special time’
- Schedule time-slots in your day of uninterrupted reflection and contemplation, during this time you need to allow your thoughts to be flexible and emergent. Control your trail of thought not so much that you go completely off topic, but just enough so as to relax and allow for ‘random association’.
- During this time it helps to ask yourself directed questions, actively attempt to solve problems and intentionally think of new ideas.
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln
Drugs
- I’ll let Jason Silva of ‘Shots of Awe’ explain this one to you. Sure he’s a little ‘enthusiastic’, but his premise is pretty interesting. If you could assure ‘functional output’ from responsible doses of psychedelic substances, then it becomes one of our most transformational options for shifting our perspective.
