Changing how we talk to ourselves is the easiest and most powerful way to overcome procrastination. No other method that I know of disarms procrastination so rapidly and at such a fundamental level: that of our own thoughts.

The Voices Inside Our Heads

Inside our minds, we’re talking to ourselves all the time. Even when you’re not paying attention, these relentless mental debates deeply influence our feelings and, ultimately, our behavior.

The good news is that just becoming aware of such mental dialogues — noticing patterns and turning them into productive statements — is usually all you need to overcome many undesirable feelings and behaviors.

Let’s see how this can help us when it comes to procrastination.

The Procrastinator’s Motto

Consider the following thought, which have crossed our minds many times in the past:

“I have to finish this long, important project. I need to plow through it, as it should already be done by now.”

Now, tell me you don’t have that thought sometimes. For me, no other passage embodies our procrastinator’s mind so well: as we’ll see, this small, seemingly innocent thought contains almost every mental block that encourages procrastination. That’s why I like to call it the Procrastinator’s Motto.

We all use the Procrastinator’s Motto (or variations of it) every once in a while. If you’re a chronic procrastinator, chances are you repeat it to yourself very frequently — daily, perhaps.

But what’s so wrong about the Procrastinator’s Motto? In what ways do these words encourage procrastination so much — and what can we do about it?

From Procrastinator to Producer: A Step-by-Step Self Talk Guide

To understand how what’s wrong with the Procrastinator’s Motto, let’s break it down in parts:

“(1) I have to (2) finish this (3) long, (4) important project. (5) I need to plow through it, as (6) it should already be done by now.”

Now let’s consider each of these six parts in turn, replacing each of them with an empowering alternative. In doing that, we’ll turn the original motto on its head and create a productive call to action: a “Producer’s Motto”, if you like.

1. I Have To → I Choose To

‘I have to’ is every procrastinator’s favorite expression. It’s also the most disempowering.

Every time you say to yourself that you have to do something, you imply that you don’t have any choice. This choice of words implies that you feel forced or coerced to do the task — that you don’t really want to do it. That perception, of course, elicits a strong feeling of victimhood and reluctance towards doing the task.

The solution to this problem is to replace ‘I have to’ with the immensely more empowering alternative ‘I choose to’.

Everything you do is ultimately a choice (yes, even completing tax forms). Using language that expresses choice reminds you of that and brings the feeling of power back.

For an in-depth exploration about the ‘I have to’ expression, check this [early article] (/overcoming-procrastination-have-to/ “Overcoming Procrastination by Avoiding ‘Have To’s”) dedicated entirely to this matter.

2. Finish → Start

When you focus on finishing something, you direct your attention to a vague, highly idealized future. Visualizing a finished project is motivating for many people, but from the point of view of who’s having a hard time starting a task, visualizing a hard-to-grasp future can be overwhelming — even depressing at times.

The solution in this case, then, is not to focus on finishing, but on starting.

Forget for a minute about the finish line, just concentrate on taking the first step. Bring your focus from the future to what can be done right now. We all know that if you start an enough number of times, you’ll eventually finish any task.

Starting — all by itself — is usually sufficient to build enough momentum to keep the ball rolling from then on. This is what Mark Forster calls the “I’ll just get the file out” technique, and it definitely works.

3. Long Project → Short Task

Constantly reminding yourself how long and challenging the upcoming undertaking is only adds to the feeling of overwhelm, and thus of procrastination.

Any undertaking, no matter how daunting, can be broken down into small steps. The trick is to, on each step along the way, focus solely on the very next smallest, doable chunk of work. Ignore the big picture for a while and just tackle that next short task.

Make it in a way you can easily visualize the outcome coming about very soon. Don’t write a book; write a page. If it still looks intimidating, you may try committing to a time box instead.

Of course, keep the big picture in mind, but use it for motivation and direction as needed, and not to frighten yourself before action.

4. Important Project → Imperfect Step

“This project has to impress everyone; I really can’t blow this opportunity.”

Putting such high stakes to a project only adds to anxiety and fear of failure. Perfectionism arises and only fuels procrastination even more.

The way to overcome this mental block is to simply give yourself permission to be human. Allow yourself to be imperfect just in this next small task.

Focus on giving an imperfect step; remember that you can always refine your work later. Better yet, make it in a way that you can’t possibly fail.

If you’re a serial perfectionist, go one step further and commit yourself to make a sloppy job on purpose, at least at first.

5. Need to Plow Through → Have Plenty of Time for Play

“I’ve got to work all weekend”. “I am trapped in this laborious project.”.

Long periods of isolation can bring an enormous feeling of resentment. This feeling generates a strong sense of deprivation and resistance towards the task.

The way to overcome this mental block is to not allow long stretches of work to creep in your activities. Schedule frequent breaks. Plan small rewards along the way. Have something to look forward to — not far away at the end of a long stretch — but in the very near feature. When rewards are small, frequent — and deserved — they work wonders.

Truly commit to leisure time. In fact, go ahead and make it mandatory. This “reverse-psychology” can by itself bring you to a whole different mindset, both more productive and enjoyable.

6. It Should Already Be Done by Now → I’ll Feel Terrific

The expression ‘should‘ is usually associated with blame and guilt. When you say you should be doing something (instead of what you’re actually doing), you focus on comparing an ideal reality with your current, “bad”, reality. You focus not on what is, but on what could have been. Misused ‘shoulds‘ can elicit a strong message of failure, depression and regret.

The solution is to focus not on how bad you feel now, but on how good you’ll feel after you take action. Yes, directed action — even the tiniest of it — towards a goal is the best motivator I know of. The trick is to bring that expected feeling of accomplishment into the present — and know that the real joy of it is only a small task away.

How Far Have We Come?

Time to check what we’ve accomplished with all the word substitutions. We started with:

“I have to finish this long, important project. I need to plow through it, as it should already be done by now.”

And ended up with:

“I choose to start this task with a small, imperfect step. I’ll have plenty of time for play and feel terrific!”

Quite a change, eh?

Every time you catch yourself repeating the Procrastinator’s Motto or any of its parts to yourself, stop and rephrase it. Then check how you feel.

While it may seem just a matter of word choices at first, when you try this simple way to reframe your thoughts, you’ll see how instantly it changes your attitude towards your tasks. Moreover, if you turn it into a habit, you’ll be slowly reprogramming your thoughts, leading to a positive, permanent change in your mindset.

The whole idea of using self talk to overcome procrastination came to me first via the great book The Now Habit by Neil Fiore, from which I learned a great deal.

While the book deals with much more than self talk (self talk is just one of the many chapters, check a summary of the book if you’re interested), that chapter alone made the most profound changes on how I deal with procrastination today.

I sincerely hope that this concept has the same impact on you, too.

Related Articles:

• Overcoming Procrastination by Avoiding ‘Have To’s
• The Now Habit
• Sunk Cost Bias: How It Hinders Your Life and 4 Ways to Overcome It
• How to Develop Your Visualization Skill

Today I have a special treat for Litemind readers. I am honored to interview Mark Forster, one of the foremost thinkers in the field of time management. He is the author of three books on time management, including the innovative (and intriguing) Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management.

Unlike many other experts, Mark goes way beyond the ‘getting organized’ approach, and acknowledges that very human problems — such as procrastination and resistance — are the main roadblocks to higher creativity and productivity.

Mark, like most of us, struggled for many years with unproductive behavior. He was only able to create his methods out of direct experimentation and learning along the way. In fact, Mark is not afraid of keeping experimenting and sharing both successes and failures in his website in a very authentic and open way.

Today, a lot of people had their lives transformed and use Mark’s methods on a daily basis (yes, that includes me). That’s why I’m really excited about this conversation: in the same way Mark has had a daily impact on my life with his work, I’m sure you can also learn a lot from him.

1. Your most popular book Do It Tomorrow has a completely different approach to that of other books on time management. The main idea of leaving tasks undone for the day is rather intriguing at first, but one that is liberating after you understand and apply it. Can you explain how this can be such a life-transforming concept?

It’s actually a very similar concept to the queuing systems which are springing up in places like shops, post offices and railway booking offices.

Instead of having a scrum of people turning up and trying to find the shortest queue, they are put into one orderly queue and dealt with in a methodical manner - which is much quicker than the old multi-queue system.

What these systems do is put a buffer between the customers (who arrive in a completely random way) so that they can be dealt with in an orderly manner.

So what I am suggesting is that in a similar way we impose a buffer on all the bits of work which arrive in a random way over the course of a day. That means we can deal with them in an orderly fashion instead of rushing from one thing to another. The default buffer is to “do it tomorrow”, which means we can deal with things like email, paperwork and tasks by batching up similar items. Dealing with similar items in batches is far faster and more efficient than dealing with them piecemeal.

Of course if you have something that really has to be done today, then you do it today. The key is to resist the temptation to do things immediately which really don’t merit that degree of urgency.

2. Litemind readers may already be familiar with one of the cornerstone concepts of the Do It Tomorrow, the ‘Will-do List’. In a previous article, I focused on how it frees us from the tyrannical rule of the never-ending task list. Can you elaborate on the importance of the ‘Will Do List’ in the grand scheme of the Do It Tomorrow productivity system?

I called it the “Will Do” list in contrast to the traditional “To Do” list. A To Do list comes in many shapes and forms, but generally speaking it is a list of possible items from which you select your work for the day. Mine usually ended up longer at the end of the day than at the start because I kept adding to it!

By contrast, a Will Do list is a statement of intent about what you really mean to get done that day. The aim is to finish it every day. If you don’t finish it, then you should look at why and do something about it. It’s very simple to construct a Will Do list if you are “doing it tomorrow” because yesterday’s incoming work can be easily batched up to form the list.

Because there’s a tie-in between one day’s incoming work and one day’s outgoing work it’s much easier to diagnose what the problem is if you can’t do all your work than with convention time management systems.

3. I know many people who steer clear from productivity systems claiming that adopting them would hurt their creativity. Many of them — especially the ‘artistic types’ — tend to see these two concepts almost as diametrically opposed. How do these two variables — creativity and productivity — relate to each other?

I’ve coached lots of artistic people over the years, singers, musicians, painters, architects and so on, and what I’ve found is that their artistic ability is often held back because they are so disorganized. It’s very difficult to be creative if you are worrying constantly about unpaid bills, the income tax return which you haven’t filled in, the fact that you haven’t done anything about publicizing your new show, etc., etc.

It’s not a case of either/or. It should be both/and, so that order complements and assists creativity.

4. I love how you honestly proclaim that resistance and procrastination are the biggest life-management problems, not just getting ‘tidy’ or ‘organized’. How are your methods different from others when it comes to dealing with these problems?

What I’ve found is that being on top of a task or project gives an immense amount of energy, even if one doesn’t particularly enjoy the subject. Contrast washing up immediately after each meal, and only washing up when dirty dishes have filled the sink and are heading towards the ceiling!

As “Do It Tomorrow” is designed to keep you on top of your work at all times, resistance and procrastination tend to fade away of their own accord.

5. You mention the concept of the rational and reactive brain. I am sure many readers can relate to the fact that we seem to show utterly different behaviors when planning and when actually trying to do the tasks. We may be fired up with enthusiasm and have the best of intentions when planning, and still dread and procrastinate when it comes to the actual doing. Could you explain how this ‘dual-brain’ principle works?

This is a very oversimplified model of how the brain works of course, but for time management purposes we live in tension between the “reptile brain”, which reacts to anything it perceives as a threat or a pleasure, and the “rational brain” which makes plans and intentions. The thing to realize is that the reptile brain is stronger than the rational brain. So when your rational brain has made a brilliant plan about how you are going to lose weight, and your reptile brain is confronted with a delicious chocolate cake, the rational plans tend to go out of the window. That’s an example of reacting to a pleasure. In the same way whenever the reptile brain perceives something as a threat, like a difficult piece of work or confronting a superior, we will tend to experience paralysis however much our rational brains are telling us the task needs to be done.

The rational brain has one great advantage over the reptile brain. It’s capable of outwitting the reptile brain. Much of what I teach is about how it can do that.

6. In the book Get Everything Done, you mention that the secret to good life-management is to do what you are resisting the most at any one time. Can you provide further insight on that concept for those not familiar with the book?

Our natural way of working is to follow the path of least resistance. If we are given a list of tasks, we will tend to do the easy ones first. The problem with this is that when we get to a certain level of difficulty, there is a tendency to invent more easy tasks to avoid having to do the more difficult tasks. That is one of the reasons people get submerged in a sea of trivia. If we reverse this and do the tasks we least want to first, then our day will get progressively easier and there will be no need to invent any more “busy work”.

I don’t though think that it’s necessary to follow this principle when using the DIT system, as any new “busy work” you invent will not affect what you have to do today.

7. In your books you slay the sacred cow of time management: prioritizing. Many systems have complex schemes of organizing tasks by urgency, importance or by a myriad of other factors. Your approach is to avoid prioritizing altogether. With the ever-increasing amount of work in our lives, is this possible?

It’s not really possible to avoid prioritizing by urgency, though I distinguish between tasks that are really urgent from tasks that are only urgent because I didn’t get round to doing them earlier. It’s prioritizing by importance that I have issues with. I strongly believe that if you have taken on a commitment then you have committed yourself to doing all the work associated with that commitment. For example, if you are building a car, which is more important - the engine or the rear windscreen wiper? Obviously the engine is, but customers are not going to be very pleased if you deliver cars without the rear windscreen wiper if that’s what they ordered. So it really doesn’t matter which is more important - you have to do the lot!

So the level at which you decide what you are going to do and what you are not going to do must be at the level of commitments. It’s no good identifying which tasks are important - that’s too late. You have to keep your commitments well audited.

8. Well, you not only talk about avoiding prioritization, but you also suggest that many times doing the least urgent project first is the way to go. Can you please elaborate on that?

I need to stress here that this is a way of dealing with projects not tasks. What tends to happen is that we leave a project until the very last moment and then have to rush to get it done. What I am suggesting here is that we start working on a project as soon as we receive it. That means that we can take advantage of all the time available to do it and will not find ourselves running up against the deadline.

9. Mark, your books Do It Tomorrow and Get Everything Done are permanent references in my shelf when it comes to time management. I haven’t had the chance to read your book How to Make Your Dreams Come True as it’s currently out of print. Can we expect to see a reprint? Are there any plans for a brand new book?

I’m actively considering whether to make Dreams into an e-book or possibly even to put the text onto my website for free. I do have various ideas for a new book but nothing has coalesced enough yet!

10. If you had to highlight one advantage of Do It Tomorrow over other time management systems, what would that be?

Its simplicity. And also the fact that you can go to bed at night knowing that you have completed your work for the day.

Related Articles:

• Time Budget: An Easy Way to Avoid Prioritization Dilemmas and Keep Your Life Balanced
• Overwhelmed by Your To-Do List? Go With a ‘Will-Do’ List Instead.
• 15 Time Boxing Strategies to Get Things Done
• 6 Productivity Tips to a Stress-Free Life

In this post, I present a summary of the mind-expanding bestseller How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day, along with some thoughts about Leonardo and the book. (To skip directly to the summary, click here.)

Leonardo is my Childhood (and Adulthood) Hero

Since my childhood, I was utterly fascinated by the figure of Leonardo da Vinci and his achievements. It never ceased to puzzle and amaze me how a single person could be a scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer.

Fast forward many years, it was when visiting Leonardo’s exhibition in the Milan Science and Technology Museum that I decided to have him as a permanent source of inspiration for life. Being able to get in touch with his mastery of both science and arts captivated me for good.

Leonardo is not only probably the greatest genius ever: he’s the one that most fully embodies the ‘Renaissance Man‘ ideal. Pursuing that ideal means being focused not on excelling on a single knowledge domain, but on having a holistic view of excellence in life. It means much more than just intellectual achievement, it means full realization of human potential in every aspect.

A Framework for Genius

In How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, author Michael Gelb does a superb job of capturing the essence of Leonardo’s genius and laying it out in a practical framework for self-improvement. Here are the 7 key areas that shaped Leonardo’s genius and which you can use as a framework for your own self-improvement:

1. Curiosità: An insatiably curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for continuous learning.
2. Dimostrazione: A commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence, and a willingness to learn from mistakes.
3. Sensazione: The continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience.
4. Sfumato: A willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty.
5. Arte/Scienza: The development of the balance between science and art, logic and imagination. “Whole-brain” thinking.
6. Corporalitá: The cultivation of grace, ambidexterity, fitness, and poise.
7. Connessione: A recognition of and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena. Systems thinking.

In the book there’s a thorough explanation of how each of these seven key areas applies in Leonardo’s life. More importantly, it’s packed with practical advice and dozens of exercises you can start doing immediately to develop your thinking skills in many unconventional ways. For a reference to the exercises, check the free book summary below.

Book Summary

This mind map summary focuses on the practical exercises contained in the book, so it’s intended to be more of a reference you can come back to from time to time than a complete replacement of the book. (If you enjoyed the article 120 Ways to Boost Your Brain Power, you’ll recognize that some of those tips came from this book, but you’ll also find a wealth of new tips which aren’t in that article.)

Get the mind map for How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci:

• Online interactive version
  Less artful, but viewable in your browser (requires only Flash Player).
• Download in MindManager format
  Full version (568 kb, requires MindManager).
• Download map in FreeMind format
  The online version, for download (76 kb, requires FreeMind).

As a side note, I found it rather amusing to summarize this book using mind mapping, since How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci was one the first references I came across when learning about the technique.

Conclusion

About a decade later, after having bought it in 1998, I still use How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci regularly as a reference for inspiration and personal growth. This book ended up becoming one of the most influential for me, solidifying my choice of Leonardo as a role model and presenting a very useful framework that I use for self-development up until today.

…Which made me curious. Do you have one or more role models in life? Who inspires you the most to reach your full potential? Share in the comments!

Related Articles:

• The Now Habit
• The Medici Effect
• One Small Step Can Change Your Life
• Never Eat Alone
• Journal to the Self: 13 Tools to Make Journaling Work for You
• Getting to Yes
• What is Mind Mapping? (and How to Get Started Immediately)
• Study Matrix Mind Map Showcase
• How to Recall an Entire Book in 5 Minutes or Less
• 120 Ways to Boost Your Brain Power

Here are 120 things you can do starting today to help you think faster, improve memory, comprehend information better and unleash your brain’s full potential.

1. Solve puzzles and brainteasers.
2. Cultivate ambidexterity. Use your non-dominant hand to brush your teeth, comb your hair or use the mouse. Write with both hands simultaneously. Switch hands for knife and fork.
3. Embrace ambiguity. Learn to enjoy things like paradoxes and optical illusions.
4. Learn mind mapping.
5. Block one or more senses. Eat blindfolded, wear earplugs, shower with your eyes closed.
6. Develop comparative tasting. Learn to properly taste wine, chocolate, beer, cheese or anything else.
7. Find intersections between seemingly unrelated topics.
8. Learn to use different keyboard layouts. Try Colemak or Dvorak for a full mind twist!
9. Find novel uses for common objects. How many different uses can you find for a nail? 10? 100?
10. Reverse your assumptions.
11. Learn creativity techniques.
12. Go beyond the first, ‘right’ answer.
13. Transpose reality. Ask “What if?” questions.
14. SCAMPER!
15. Turn pictures or the desktop wallpaper upside down.
16. Become a critical thinker. Learn to spot common fallacies.
17. Learn logic. Solve logic puzzles.
18. Get familiar with the scientific method.
19. Draw. Doodle. You don’t need to be an artist.
20. Think positive.
21. Engage in arts — sculpt, paint, play music — or any other artistic endeavor.
22. Learn to juggle.
23. Eat ‘brain foods’.
24. Be slightly hungry.
25. Exercise!
26. Sit up straight.
27. Drink lots of water.
28. Deep-breathe.
29. Laugh!
30. Vary activities. Get a hobby.
31. Sleep well.
32. Power nap.
33. Listen to music.
34. Conquer procrastination.
35. Go technology-less.
36. Look for brain resources in the web.
37. Change clothes. Go barefoot.
38. Master self-talk.
39. Simplify!
40. Play chess or other board games. Play via Internet (particularly interesting is to play an ongoing game by e-mail).
41. Play ‘brain’ games. Sudoku, crossword puzzles or countless others.
42. Be childish!
43. Play video games.
44. Be humorous! Write or create a joke.
45. Create a List of 100.
46. Have an Idea Quota.
47. Capture every idea. Keep an idea bank.
48. Incubate ideas. Let ideas percolate. Return to them at regular intervals.
49. Engage in ‘theme observation’. Try to spot the color red as many times as possible in a day. Find cars of a particular make. Invent a theme and focus on it.
50. Keep a journal.
51. Learn a foreign language.
52. Eat at different restaurants - ethnic restaurants specially.
53. Learn how to program a computer.
54. Spell long words backwards. !gnignellahC
55. Change your environment. Change the placement of objects or furniture — or go somewhere else.
56. Write! Write a story, poetry, start a blog.
57. Learn sign language.
58. Learn a musical instrument.
59. Visit a museum.
60. Study how the brain works.
61. Learn to speed-read.
62. Find out your learning style.
63. Dump the calendar!
64. Try to mentally estimate the passage of time.
65. “Guesstimate”. Are there more leaves in the Amazon rainforest or neuron connections in your brain? (answer).
66. Make friends with math. Fight ‘innumeracy’.
67. Build a Memory Palace.
68. Learn a peg system for memory.
69. Have sex! (sorry, no links for this one! )
70. Memorize people’s names.
71. Meditate. Cultivate mindfulness and an empty mind.
72. Watch movies from different genres.
73. Turn off the TV.
74. Improve your concentration.
75. Get in touch with nature.
76. Do mental math.
77. Have a half-speed day.
78. Change the speed of certain activities. Go either super-slow or super-fast deliberately.
79. Do one thing at a time.
80. Be aware of cognitive biases.
81. Put yourself in someone else’s shoes. How would different people think or solve your problems? How would a fool tackle it?
82. Adopt an attitude of contemplation.
83. Take time for solitude and relaxation.
84. Commit yourself to lifelong learning.
85. Travel abroad. Learn about different lifestyles.
86. Adopt a genius. (Leonardo is excellent company!)
87. Have a network of supportive friends.
88. Get competitive.
89. Don’t stick with only like-minded people. Have people around that disagree with you.
90. Brainstorm!
91. Change your perspective. Short/long-term, individual/collective.
92. Go to the root of the problems.
93. Collect quotes.
94. Change the media you’re working on. Use paper instead of the computer; voice recording instead of writing.
95. Read the classics.
96. Develop your reading skill. Reading effectively is a skill. Master it.
97. Summarize books.
98. Develop self-awareness.
99. Say your problems out loud.
100. Describe one experience in painstaking detail.
101. Learn Braille. You can start learning the floor numbers while going up or down the elevator.
102. Buy a piece of art that disturbs you. Stimulate your senses in thought-provoking ways.
103. Try different perfumes and scents.
104. Mix your senses. How much does the color pink weigh? How does lavender scent sound?
105. Debate! Defend an argument. Try taking the opposite side, too.
106. Use time boxing.
107. Allocate time for brain development.
108. Have your own mental sanctuary.
109. Be curious!
110. Challenge yourself.
111. Develop your visualization skills. Use it at least 5 minutes a day.
112. Take notes of your dreams. Keep a notebook by your bedside and record your dreams first thing in the morning or as you wake up from them.
113. Learn to lucid dream.
114. Keep a lexicon of interesting words. Invent your own words.
115. Find metaphors. Connect abstract and specific concepts.
116. Manage stress.
117. Get random input. Write about a random word in a magazine. Read random sites using StumbleUpon or Wikipedia.
118. Take different routes each day. Change the streets you follow to work, jog or go back home.
119. Install a different operating system on your computer.
120. Improve your vocabulary.
121. Deliver more than what’s expected.

Readers’ Contributions

1. Dance! (by Shanel Yang)
2. Study Philoshophy and the writings of great thinkers. (by ZHereford)
3. Be around people that are smarter than you. (by Angel Cuala)
4. Use ‘brain fitness’ software. (by Eric Blue)
5. Read text upside down (the text, not you… well, you can try that, too). (by Thales)
6. Act in a stageplay. (by Thales)
7. Practice ‘environmental creativity’. Keep asking yourself questions like “What does this mean?” and “How can I use this?”. (by Chuck Frey)
8. Use a reverse clock. You can buy one or make your own. (by Brendan Dunphy)
9. Take an improvisation class. (by Patricia Ryan Madson)
10. Pun! Play with words. (by David Lurey)
11. Do It Yourself: Create or repair things without the aid of paid professionals. Repair, sew, cook, build, weave, paint, etc. (by b.honey)
12. Teach someone something you know. (by Usiku)
13. Help a child with their homework. (by Usiku)
14. Provide thoughtful comments on blogs and websites. (by Usiku)
15. Discuss religion and politics, even with friends. (by Usiku)
16. Teach yourself origami. (by Pamela)
17. Learn to knit or crochet. (by Pamela)
18. Shop at a market different from the usual. (by Pamela)
19. Think of something you fear. Work to conquer it. (by Pamela)
20. Play bridge (or other card games). (by millie)
21. Practice Yoga. (by Rajesh)
22. Learn martial arts. (by Chirou)
23. Study the concepts of Relativity (both General and Special). (by Tim)
24. Practice echolocation (sense objects by hearing echoes from those objects). (by Tim)
25. Help and immigrant learn your language. (by Ray)

Contribute your own tip!

There are many, many ways to keep our brains sharp. I’m sure you have your own personal favorite, so please share it in the comments! I’ll regularly compile the best tips and add them to this list (giving full credit, with a link to your site, if you have one). Thanks!

Related Articles:

• How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci
• How to Recall an Entire Book in 5 Minutes or Less
• How to Become a Human Calendar
• Develop Perfect Memory With the Memory Palace Technique

Wherever you ask, when it comes to group problem-solving, brainstorming is always the default tool of choice. Brainstorming certainly gets all the fame and glory, but is it the most effective tool for groups to generate ideas? Not necessarily.

Traditional brainstorming pales in comparison with a technique called Brainwriting. Brainwriting can easily lead to more than double the ideas generated in a typical brainstorming session. Also, it’s not as tricky as brainstorming to work well for you.

The Shortcomings of Brainstorming

Brainstorming is by far the most widely used group idea generation tool. We all know the drill: get together in a room and let the ideas run wild while building on each other’s ideas.

One of the reasons brainstorming is so popular is because of the widespread notion that grouping people together is always more effective than letting participants work in isolation. On a first look that makes sense, but is it really so?

That’s not what some recent research shows. Several studies (notably Diehl and Strobe’s, from 1987 to 1994) tested brainstorming teams extensively and realized that participants working in isolation consistently outperformed participants working in groups, both in quantity and quality of ideas generated.

The fact is that brainstorming, the way it’s carried out, has some fundamental shortcomings that are hard to overcome. Here are the top 3 reasons why brainstorming usually isn’t as effective as you might think:

1. “Blocking”

This is by far the number one deficiency in traditional brainstorming: only one person can speak at a time.

The problem with that lies in the fact that our short-term memory can’t effectively develop new ideas while keeping old ones in active storage. If we can’t announce our ideas because we have to wait for someone else to describe theirs, we will end up judging or editing them — or even forgetting them altogether.

Not surprisingly, this makes all the difference in our idea output. Even when we do get a chance to describe an idea, we may get to offer only one or two comments before someone else breaks in.

The larger the brainstorming group, the bigger the amount of “blocked” participants, and the fewer the ideas produced compared to an equal number of people generating ideas independently.

2. Evaluation Apprehension

This relates to the fact that some group members avoid expressing what they consider to be wild ideas based on how the other members will privately judge them.

“Suspend judgment!”, “Be wild and outrageous!”, “Speak with no fear!”: this is advice that is hard to take when you’re in company of an authority figure, such as the guy who gets to decide how small your annual bonus will be.

Despite the soundness of the advice to let ideas run wild, the truth is that many groups are not mature or prepared enough to follow it. “Maybe my idea” — they think — “will be seen as way off the mark, so why take any chances?”

3. Personality Face Off

Brainstorming sessions can easily become an arena of clashing human personalities. True, diversity is a necessary part of effective brainstorming, but it also makes fertile ground for all sorts of unproductive behavior.

Examples? Overpowering people trying to dominate the session. Passive people speaking the minimum possible to get by unnoticed. Stubborn people getting overprotective about their ideas and not accepting others’. Fearful people being reticent and evasive, and only presenting safe ideas. The list goes on and on.

The bottom line is that personality differences, if not dealt appropriately, can harm more than help problem solving.

Enter Brainwriting

If brainstorming groups are usually outperformed by individuals working alone, should we quit forming brainstorming groups then? Or is there a way to brainstorm together while sidestepping those fundamental shortcomings? Time to meet the Brainwriting technique.

As in traditional brainstorming, in Brainwriting everyone sits at a table together to simultaneously tackle a problem. The difference is that in Brainwriting each participant thinks and records ideas individually, without any verbal interaction. As we’ll see, this small change results in a fundamental difference in the idea generation effectiveness.

Here are the steps in a typical Brainwriting session:

1. Participants sit around a table and each one gets a sheet of paper with the same problem statement written at the top. Just like in traditional brainstorming, you also need a moderator for the session.
2. At the moderator’s signal, each participant has 3 minutes to write down 3 ideas on the sheet of paper. Just like in traditional brainstorming, the ideas should always go unedited. The difference is that now they are being recorded in private. The number of ideas and duration can vary, but I found that “three ideas every three minutes” works particularly well.
3. When time is up (or when everybody’s done), each participant passes the sheet of paper to the participant to the left.
4. Each participant now reads the ideas that were previously written and a new three-minute round starts. Each participant must again come up with three new ideas. Participants are free to use the ideas already on the sheet as triggers — or to ignore them altogether.
5. Lather, rinse, repeat. The group can agree to stop after a fixed number of rounds (such as when sheets come to a full turn around the table) or when participants feel that contributions are exhausted.
6. After the idea-gathering phase is completed, the ideas are read, discussed and consolidated with the help of the moderator, just like in traditional brainstorming.

So, what does this small change of having the ideas written, instead of spoken accomplish?

• The amount of ideas generated can be amazing. Since ideas are generated simultaneously, participants never get to block each other. With everyone generating 3 ideas every 3 minutes, a group of 5 people is able to produce 100 ideas in 20 minutes.
• Participants still get to cross-pollinate and build on each other’s ideas. That is, they still get the benefits of brainstorming in a group, while avoiding its main shortcomings.
• Ideas are recorded the moment you get them: no ideas are lost while you wait for a chance to speak.
• No one gets overshadowed and everybody contributes equally, regardless of personality type or personal agenda.
• Ideas are contributed in private. In less mature environments, there’s no fear of being openly judged by other participants. The ideas can be kept anonymous and participants have freedom to be truly wild with their ideas.
• Everyone’s given a clear task: to fulfill a specific idea quota in a specific time frame. The quota adds an element of healthy pressure that can help unlock your creativity, as it can be seen as a fun challenge.

Closing Thoughts

To be fair, there are ways to make traditional brainstorming work better (that may be the theme for a future article). However, using Brainwriting is always my preferred choice, as it often generates many more ideas and it’s way easier to get it right.

Here are some additional recommended resources on Brainwriting:

1. Mycoted Brainwriting Page: The Mycoted wiki is an amazing online resource of creativity techniques (make sure to check their index page). The Brainwriting page has several interesting variations of the technique. Highly recommended.
2. Michael Michalko’s book Cracking Creativity. An impressive resource. It has a great wealth of thinking and creativity techniques, including Brainwriting. Michalko’s book always tops my recommendations of books on creativity.
3. MindMeister online mind mapping tool. MindMeister is the best tool I found so far for web-based, real-time, collaborative mind mapping. Even though it wasn’t specifically designed to support Brainwriting, it works very well for that purpose.

Also, to make sure you don’t miss complementary content, such as templates for Brainwriting and idea-generation in general, sign up for the free Litemind Newsletter.

Over to you now: share your experiences with brainstorming and Brainwriting. Have you ever faced the problems I described with brainstorming? Have you tried Brainwriting? If you have any experience with specific online thinking tools (designed for Brainwriting or not), sharing your experiences here would be invaluable. Thanks!

Related Articles:

• Tackle Any Issue With a List of 100
• Solve Your Problems Simply by Saying Them Out Loud
• Creative Problem Solving with SCAMPER
• Boost Your Brainstorm Effectiveness with the Why Habit
• Topics du Jour: Give Your Life Direction in Less than 10 Minutes a Day
• The Medici Effect
• Get Mentally Fit with an Idea Quota
• 6 Tips to Generate Outstanding Ideas

Today marks Litemind’s first anniversary. When I started the site, I really didn’t know what to expect, but looking back from today, I am very glad I decided to take that first imperfect step…

Running this website has been a truly enjoyable and worthwhile experience in every aspect. It’s a great feeling knowing that the ideas I share here have been useful to many people. Not only that, but it’s amazing to realize how this website has been instrumental for my own personal growth. Thank you all!

A special ‘thank you’ also goes to the many of you that helped spread the word about the site or otherwise expressed appreciation for it.

I surely enjoy praise — who doesn’t? — but an even bigger round of thanks goes to those who provided me with honest criticism; those who exposed flaws in my reasoning or made suggestions to make this site better. It’s great to have you around pointing out my blind spots. Providing specific feedback is one of the best ways you can help me with the site.

Looking Ahead

Fortunately, Litemind is no longer the lone place it was a year ago. However, it wasn’t until recently that I realized that I hadn’t completely broken free from the ‘monologue’ mindset of the early days.

A great part of blogging is about having a community of readers and bloggers interacting with each other, exploring, exchanging and discussing ideas together. And collaborating more closely with you is something that I’m sure will make Litemind a richer experience for us all.

Increasing involvement with you readers is my main goal for this site from now on.

Let me share with you some steps I’m undertaking towards that goal.

Opening Up Communication Channels

About a month ago, I quietly added a poll at the bottom of every page in this site. Even without any announcement, the participation has been great. The lesson? Readers are willing to participate when given the chance. Based on that, I decided to always have some kind of poll active in the site, as I think it’s a quick and effective way of communication we can use.

If you haven’t done so, please take a few seconds and take the poll that’s now on. This one is about what your favorite topics are — an important feedback for letting me know your expectations about the site.

Fostering Reader Participation

This site has the privilege of having many insightful readers that contribute via comments. It’s not rare to have interesting comment threads still going on for articles that are several months old. In order to make those great discussions harder to miss, I am now showing the latest comments in the sidebar.

I would also like to bring you more into the spotlight. Some options I am considering are highlighting active commenters and discussing particularly insightful themes publicly.

Another area for improvement is having more collaborative projects on the site. One experiment we had here (the Lists Group Writing Project) was very stimulating and fun, so I thought about running more projects like that one.

Featuring Guest Bloggers

I already had a couple of guest bloggers this past year, and it was wonderful to bring different perspectives to the site. There are a lot of great minds around willing to share ideas, so I figured it would be even more productive to make more space available for this kind of collaboration. (If you’re interested in guest posting on Litemind, here are some helpful guidelines.)

“Getting Social”

I usually have links to share, quick questions to ask or half-baked ideas that I feel don’t deserve full blog posts. However, I still think these things should be shared and discussed.

For that reason, I recently got started in microblogging. (If you don’t know what microblogging is, think of it as instant messaging, but public instead of private.)

Microblogging is something that I initially resisted as I couldn’t see the value in it. Now I see it: it’s a quick, efficient and more informal channel of communication. Let me put it this way: if the blog is a presentation and the comments are the QA session at the end, then microblogging is the ‘water-cooler chat’: a much more informal and relaxed environment for conversations and sharing of ideas.

The microblogging platform I use is Twitter — which is both free to join and easy to use. You’re more than welcome to follow me there and join the conversation.

Also, if you use social media services such as Facebook, StumbleUpon or others, please feel free to check my activity there and to add me to your contact list, too.

Creating a Free Newsletter with Exclusive Content

Last but not least, I just opened up registration for an e-mail newsletter. By signing up for the newsletter, you’ll have access to extra, complementary content that will expand on the ideas in the website.

The details (such as when I’ll start sending the newsletters) aren’t yet finalized: it will all depend on many factors, including how people react to the idea and how many subscribers it gets.

One thing you can rest assured is that the newsletter will always be relevant to the topics of the website. If you enjoy the site, it’s a safe bet that you’ll enjoy receiving the newsletter.

Also, the details you provide (name and e-mail address) will be used solely for the purpose of sending you the newsletter. Your details will never be disclosed to any other third party.

To sign up for the newsletter, click here.

In Closing

Thanks again for a great year! I am truly excited about having you around and I’m eager to see how the coming years unfold at Litemind.

If you have any feedback about the ideas I outlined here or have any ideas of your own, please let me know in the comments (or in private, if you prefer). I really appreciate it!

Related Articles:

• Imperfect Start
• Announcing the Lists Group Writing Project

Topics du Jour is a powerful journaling technique you can use to review, plan and put your life in perspective within no more than 5 or 10 minutes of your day. Here’s how it works:

Number down a page from 1 to 30. Write in each line one aspect of your life that you would like to monitor. Then, each day of the month, look at the corresponding topic and write a paragraph or two about it.

You may end up writing about your plans, or maybe about a specific problem you’re facing in that area. Or perhaps you will end up just babbling — it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you’ll be spending those few daily minutes specifically giving attention to what matters in your life. That’s why I like this technique: it’s quick, intuitive and, above all, it gets you into the daily habit of connecting with what’s important in your life.

Here are a few examples of topics you can write about:

• Career
• Family
• Friends
• Health
• Money
• Spiritual Life
• Learning
• Leisure
• Aging
• Contribution

Bear in mind that the topics don’t need to be limited to the usual notion of ‘life areas’. You can, for example, pick themes such as ‘Successes’, ‘Dreams’, ‘Goals’, ‘Frustrations’, ‘Procrastination’; or anything else you believe would be interesting to revisit regularly.

A note about the number of topics: to be fair, you don’t need to define 30 topics to write about: the only requirement is that you keep a schedule to cycle between your topics, no matter how many of them there are. My schedule, for example, consists of 10 topics rotated biweekly, weekdays only.

Top 3 Benefits of Topics du Jour

1. Touch-Base All Life Areas

We usually don’t need complex tools to find out how to improve our lives. All we need is to get into the habit of connecting with our inner selves and listen. However, this is not as easy as it seems at first, as we tend to get stuck in just one or two dominant aspects of our lives and think only about those.

That’s exactly how Topics du Jour can help: it serves as a framework you can use to regularly connect with yourself and methodically focus on each and every important aspect of your life.

2. Get Instantly Motivated to Action

Facing the different aspects of your life on a daily basis is an act of courage. Bringing long-standing issues to the surface can be scary. Getting to regularly overcome the resistance to face these issues gives you an immediate sense of power and control.

Even more important is the fact that, by consciously bringing those issues to the surface, you can actually do something about them.

And here’s a suggestion, which is the only “rule” I have in my Topics du Jour sessions: once you’re done, look at what you’ve written and define at least one action you can do to move you forward in that area. Think of the smallest step possible you can take and, if at all possible, don’t even write it down: do it immediately! Maybe it’s a phone call; maybe it’s just tidying up your desk or deleting an old file on your computer. The motivating effect of immediate action, no matter how tiny, never ceases to amaze me.

3. Uncover Patterns

Contrary to regular journal entries, which are usually long and digressing, Topics du Jour entries tend to be short and to-the-point, making them perfect to be reviewed at a later time.

You can take, for example, several entries for just one particular topic and read them all in sequence. By doing that, you can get new insights about your advancement in that area, as well as uncover recurrent thinking patterns and struggles.

Another interesting way you can review your entries is by reading the entries in all topics for a certain period of your life. That way, you can find relationships between different aspects of your life (such as how one area impacts others).

How Topics du Jour Complements Getting Things Done (or How I Stopped Worrying About ‘High-Level’ Life Reviews)

Topics du Jour stands on its own as a self-knowledge journaling tool. The surprising discovery I made is that it really shines when used together with productivity systems such as David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD). For me, Topics du Jour picks up exactly where GTD leaves off. Let me explain.

GTD is a great bottom-up approach to get your life in control. In order to put your life in perspective, you need a certain level of control in your life first. “If your ship is sinking, it doesn’t matter where it’s headed at”, Allen usually says. So, organizing low-level tasks and projects is a great place to start to get your life under control.

But once the organizing part is taken care of, you need to climb up and review your life from ‘higher altitudes’ — otherwise you’ll be trapped in mindless, never-ending micromanagement of tasks. Granted, GTD mentions that you should have those kinds of higher-altitude reviews, but it offers little guidance on how to do them.

In my case, even when trying to adopt other, more top-down oriented approaches — such as Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — I could never form the proper habits to make these reviews work. After many years of trying, I finally found out why.

Why High-Level Reviews Didn’t Work

The problems with my high-level reviews were twofold:

• Too analytical. Linear, left-brain thinking may be great for managing to-do lists, but it failed me miserably when doing high-level reviews. For years I struggled trying to find the perfect structure for my high-level reviews: checklists of questions, improvement charts, SWOT matrices — I tried them all. And, no matter how my logical mind told me that these methods should work, I kept struggling. The very structures that I set up were preventing me from gaining access to the abstract thinking that’s required for high-level reviews.
• Too frightening. The idea of sitting down to define goals and major directions for my life was always dreadful to me. I used to set my goals all at once (New Year’s resolutions, anyone?). No wonder that the mere idea of such big ‘life reviews’ overwhelmed me.

As you already figured out by now, Topics du Jour resolved both problems.

No More High-Level Reviews

After journaling for a while, I noticed that I didn’t need those dreadful, big bang-like reviews. As it happens, I dropped the idea of ‘life reviews’ altogether in favor of Topics du Jour sessions. In a truly kaizen style, my higher-level thinking is now spread daily, and consists of nothing more than the Topics du Jour journaling sessions.

It came as an unexpectedly nice surprise to me how a journaling technique solved, quite by accident, an age-old problem I had. Here’s how:

• Too analytical? Topics du Jour (as any form of journaling) can be a truly sensorial experience. Put an ambient light on, grab a comfortable pen or a nice and sexy text editor, and just write. Let go of your overly-dominant left-brain and let your intuition speak: no projects list, no estimating, no priorities. It’s refreshing being able to include a ‘soft’ tool like journaling to the highly-structured world of productivity systems.
• Too frightening? Topics du Jour allows me to review my life one bit a day, splitting up a once huge and frightening task into several smaller, more manageable parts. In fact, I now look forward to my daily journaling sessions. There are no expectations whatsoever about these sessions — and, therefore, no unfulfilled expectations. The directions, the goals, the frustrations: they all just seem to emerge naturally instead of being forced upon me at a particular, pre-defined review date.

Try It

For a long time I’ve been reading about the benefits of keeping a daily journal. However, I always thought it wouldn’t be practical in my life, as it would take too much of my time. With the Topics du Jour technique, I don’t spend more than 10 minutes a day (well, I created a focused time box around it, just in case). And I can say that I actually gained time, as I spend much less time setting goals or worrying about those big, dreadful life reviews.

The Topics du Jour technique — like almost everything else I know about journaling — was learned from the excellent book Journal to the Self, by Kathleen Adams (click here for the book summary).

Give it a try. If you need further topic suggestions, I recommend you check the ones from the book (they can be found in the book’s mind map).

Related Articles:

• Tackle Any Issue With a List of 100
• Solve Your Problems Simply by Saying Them Out Loud
• Send a Time Capsule to Your Future Self
• Journal to the Self: 13 Tools to Make Journaling Work for You
• Creative Problem Solving with SCAMPER
• Brainwriting is Brainstorming on Steroids
• Boost Your Brainstorm Effectiveness with the Why Habit

The sunk cost bias is a thinking trap that not only slows down personal improvement efforts, but one which can make people literally waste their whole lives on — something I’ve seen happening with disturbing regularity. The good news is that, like most thinking traps, the biggest step you can take to overcome it is by simply becoming aware of it.

Suppose you pre-ordered a non-refundable ticket to a basketball game. However, on the night of the game, you simply don’t feel like going anymore: you’re tired, there’s a blizzard raging outside, and the game will be televised. You regret the fact that you bought the ticket because, frankly, you would prefer to stay at home, light up your fireplace and comfortably watch the game on TV.

But the fact is that you did buy the ticket — and it was quite expensive and hard to get. What would you do?

The Sunk Cost Bias Exposed

Sunk costs are costs that are irrecoverable. It’s something that you already spent and that you won’t get back, regardless of future outcomes. It’s like that gym club membership you bought: whether you get its benefits or not, the money is gone and there’s no way to get it back.

In the basketball game ticket example, the point is that the money is already gone, so now you are better off doing what pleases you best. So, unless you can sell the ticket, just forget about what you paid for it. You are better off using it to help fuel the fireplace while you comfortably enjoy the game on TV.

This is, of course, easier said than done. There are many psychological blocks in the way of simply discarding an expensive ticket. And if that holds true for a mere basketball game ticket, imagine how strong that effect is when it comes to, say, abandoning a long-time relationship that you invested so much time on, but that just isn’t working anymore.

That’s the sunk cost bias. It’s what you may have heard as “throwing good money after bad”, but it isn’t just about money: any type of investment you make — time, money, effort, anything — is subject to this thinking trap.

Are You a Victim of the Sunk Cost Bias?

Persisting with bad decisions due to our irrational attachment to costs that we cannot recover has become so common that you can find them just about anywhere. Big organizations and governments excel at it. (A government that insists on a war so the lives already spent “are not wasted” comes to mind, but I digress…)

The fact is that this mental trap permeates our decision making and affects not only organizations, but it deeply affects us at a personal level, too. Check out some examples:

• Bad overall life decisions: What would you say about persisting on an unfulfilling job or career, just because you ‘invested so much time in it’? Or persisting on a bad relationship, just to ‘make all those years worth it’? These are the saddest cases of the sunk cost effect that I know, since people can literally waste years — if not their whole lives — because of it.
• Bad financial decisions: Do you know anyone who refused to sell something for a perfectly reasonable price, just because they spent so much money in it (maybe property or stocks)? What about casino gamblers that simply won’t quit, claiming they need to make the money that they already lost “worth it”?
• Bad Everyday Decisions: You ordered too much food, but you eat it anyway despite being full. You keep useless clutter in your home, if only because you paid for it. You watch a bad movie up to the end, only because you started watching it. The examples just go on and on. The consequences for each of them may seem trivial at first, but if you think about it, we make these mistakes so often that they add up pretty quickly.

Why Do We Fall Into the Trap and How to Avoid It

So, if dwelling on sunk costs is a bad idea, why do we do it? More importantly, how do we overcome this thinking trap? Here are 4 main reasons why we do it, along with ways to overcome each of them.

1. We Want to Make the Investment Worth Our While

This is the fundamental reasoning behind how we deal with sunk costs. We have a genuine interest in making our efforts worth our while. We don’t want to feel that we spent anything in vain — time, money, anything. However, even if we know deep inside that our approach is wrong, we still have trouble abandoning it.

Solution

Sure, we all expect to have a good return on what we invest. It would be insane not to. Just make sure you’re not on a situation solely because you made the investment in the first place. You don’t make a bad move any better by dwelling more on it, unless you can effectively make something that changes the expected outcome.

Stop spending resources on a bad move — throwing good money after bad — immediately and start spending these resources on a new one: Cut your losses and move on!

2. We Fear Failing and Looking Foolish

We live in a success-oriented culture. Cutting losses means admitting you made a mistake, if not in public, at least to yourself. Our egos will always stubbornly try to hold us to our commitments, so we don’t need to admit our imperfections. If you made a public commitment, you’re even less likely to break it, as there will probably be a lot of explaining to do.

Solution

Allow yourself to make mistakes. Quickly admitting your mistakes is much more productive than entrenching yourself in a situation just to “save face”. Be aware that quitting is not failing (actually, sometimes it’s exactly the opposite).

Better yet, do like Socrates and think differently: become proud of admitting your errors. Change your attitude from hiding mistakes to actively exposing them. Look for them: the more, the merrier. You’ll surely feel defenseless and uneasy at first, but once you get used to it, you’ll feel invulnerable to harsh criticism.

Moreover, instead of focusing on the sunk costs, take pride in having recognized the costs associated with sticking to the old approach.

3. We Become Attached to Our Commitments

After we decide to do something, we feel attached to what we committed to. And the bigger the commitment, the harder it is to let go. Not only that, but it’s a human trait to be overconfident that everything we set ourselves to do will pay off. We’re biased when we evaluate the probability of success of already-made commitments. (This is known as overly optimistic probability bias.)

Solution

Be aware of the natural bias to stay on your current course of action. While considering other options, evaluate the status quo as it was just another option, rather than the front-runner.

Also, try to detach yourself emotionally from your past decisions. Be especially careful with things that worked at some point in the past as this is not a guarantee that they’ll work in your favor again.

I like to practice what I call “zero-based thinking”. Forget about the past and consider this very moment as your “point-zero” in time: act like all you have is the present. I often do this by pretending that I just woke up with some sort of amnesia. I imagine myself in my current situation, but without any knowledge of how I got there. This way, it’s much easier to focus on my current situation, instead of clinging to past decisions that would drag me down.

4. We Lose Sight of Our Underlying Goals

Sometimes we become so preoccupied by how much time and effort we put into something that we lose sight of its relevance in the greater scheme of things. We become attached to the means and forget about the ends.

Solution

Always be mindful of long-term objectives. Don’t confuse any greater goal you want to achieve with the specific means of implementation you’re attached to. Don’t get caught up in justifying your current actions.

Moving away from the basketball game example, suppose your original goal was to have fun, so you rented a movie. If the movie turns out to be a bad one, don’t forget that your goal was not to spend two hours watching a movie, but to have fun. So, turn it off and go have fun, somehow.

Let Go of the Past, Move On

I’m not recommending that you become a quitter by any means. The point is to be always aware of your current situation. If you decide to stick with your current approach, that’s great. Do it consciously and for the right reasons.

And remember that the greatest example of sunk cost you pay is with your own time, and which you will not be able to recover: all that you lived up until now is gone — you just can’t reclaim that time. Stop clinging to the past and make the most of your life right now.

Related Articles:

• Overcoming Procrastination by Avoiding ‘Have To’s
• How to Develop Your Visualization Skill

In this post, I present a mind map of the book The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures, along with a quick review of the book (to skip directly to the mind map, click here).

Step Into the Intersection

In The Medici Effect, author Frans Johansson explores one simple yet profound insight about innovation: in the intersection of different fields, disciplines and cultures, there’s an abundance of extraordinary new ideas to be explored.

Putting together ideas from different areas — ideas that were always seen as completely apart — can easily generate an explosion of new ideas. And since the best way to have great ideas is to have lots of ideas, the best chances for innovation are at those intersections.

The book makes a case for learning broadly and the importance of keeping a curious attitude. This comes as an inspiring invitation to explore other areas than our own and as a reminder to always pursue our ‘side’ interests.

Johansson shares many interesting stories of cross-pollination between disciplines, as he does in his blog. Ecologists helping logistics experts to plan truck routes more efficiently, or astronomers unintentionally unraveling old ecology mysteries: the intersections are literally everywhere.

Idea Generation and Execution

What I really like about this book is that it doesn’t focus solely on the dynamics of generating innovative ideas: it goes on to discuss the implementation of ideas. All of us have great ideas every now and then. However, a great idea alone is never enough for true innovation: the bottleneck for innovation usually lies in executing your ideas.

And that is largely because there are many psychological barriers associated with pursuing novel ideas: fear of failure, social rejection, or risking one’s reputation — just to mention a few. Discussing these barriers and giving tips to overcome them makes the book even more practical and useful.

Interested? Get It All for Free.

Great news: Nicely for us, author Frans Johansson made the full book available as a free download in his website. If you don’t mind reading on the computer screen, you can’t miss the opportunity to read a great book for free.

As for the book summary, here it is in three flavors:

Get the mind map for The Medici Effect:

• Online interactive version
  Viewable in your browser, requires Flash Player.
• Download map in MindManager format
  410 kb, requires MindManager.
• Download map in FreeMind format
  60 kb, requires FreeMind.

Next Book, Please?

I usually get positive feedback for the book summaries I present here, so I will keep posting them. I have some books in my reading queue and since I’m not quite sure what to read next, I figured I should ask my readers.

Let me know what to read next by taking the poll below. These are the books I currently have in my reading queue — let’s hope they’re good enough to deserve a summary: if you have another suggestion, please let me know in the comments and I could maybe add it to my next Amazon shipment. Thanks!

Note: To to participate in this post's poll, please visit the original post.

Related Articles:

• The Now Habit
• One Small Step Can Change Your Life
• Never Eat Alone
• Journal to the Self: 13 Tools to Make Journaling Work for You
• How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci
• Getting to Yes
• What is Mind Mapping? (and How to Get Started Immediately)
• Tackle Any Issue With a List of 100
• Study Matrix Mind Map Showcase
• Solve Your Problems Simply by Saying Them Out Loud

SCAMPER is a technique you can use to spark your creativity and help you overcome any challenge you may be facing. In essence, SCAMPER is a general-purpose checklist with idea-spurring questions — which is both easy to use and surprisingly powerful.

In this posting, I present a complete SCAMPER primer, along with two free creativity-boosting resources: a downloadable reference mind map and an online tool that generates random questions to get you out of a rut whenever you need.

SCAMPER Primer

SCAMPER is based on the notion that everything new is a modification of something that already exists. Each letter in the acronym represents a different way you can play with the characteristics of what is challenging you to trigger new ideas:

• S = Substitute
• C = Combine
• A = Adapt
• M = Magnify
• P = Put to Other Uses
• E = Eliminate (or Minify)
• R = Rearrange (or Reverse)

To use the SCAMPER technique, first state the problem you’d like to solve or the idea you’d like to develop. It can be anything: a challenge in your personal life or business; or maybe a product, service or process you want to improve. After pinpointing the challenge, it’s then a matter of asking questions about it using the SCAMPER checklist to guide you.

Consider, for instance, the problem "How can I increase sales in my business?"

Following the SCAMPER recipe, here are a few questions you could ask:

• S (Substitute): "What can I substitute in my selling process?"
• C (Combine): "How can I combine selling with other activities?"
• A (Adapt): "What can I adapt or copy from someone else’s selling process?"
• M (Magnify): "What can I magnify or put more emphasis on when selling?"
• P (Put to Other Uses): "How can I put my selling to other uses?"
• E (Eliminate): "What can I eliminate or simplify in my selling process?"
• R (Rearrange): "How can I change, reorder or reverse the way I sell?"

These questions force you to think differently about your problem and eventually come up with innovative solutions.

A classic example is MacDonald’s founder Ray Kroc. In hindsight, it’s easy to identify many of the ideas he used through the SCAMPER lens: selling restaurants and real estate instead of simply hamburgers [P = Put to other uses]; having customers pay before they eat [R=Rearrange]; letting customers serve themselves, avoiding the use of waiters [E=Eliminate] — just to mention a few.

SCAMPER Reference

You will find below a comprehensive help guide to using SCAMPER. There are more than 60 questions that can be asked, along with almost 200 words and expressions you can create associations with.

(icons by Everaldo Coelho)

SCAMPER Resources