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Dangerous Knowledge

Written by: H. Bernard Wechsler

Article Overview: How secret information leads to personal success. Secret stuff connects the dots to give you a competitive advantage over your peers.

Dangerous Knowledge

Got Creativity? Speed Reading rules.

Kids are constantly creating, daydreaming or asking questions. They can transform

a boomstick into a baseball bat, rhythmically beat on pots and pans and enjoy their

music, and find the resources to build a treehouse without money.

By the end of their first year in school, creativity is mostly washed out of their

brain. It is a necessary process of socialization (not acting out) and learning to stick to a task to completion. School and the teacher is not the villain, they are performing a necessary process of civilization and fitting in.

What about adults? Our experience with school students and executives is we all

have the capability and potential to be creative, but we are scared to death of

criticism and being wrong so we sit there and shut up.

Everybody? The exception to the rule of stifling our creativity (Latin: to make)

and imagination are writers, artists, musicians, and internally driven Big-Mouths.

What the secret of being creative in your career and getting promotions and more

dinero?

Kids

What knocks kids off their creativity track?

a) "Johnny, pay attention and stop DAYDREAMING?"

b) "Maria, sit there and listen, and stop asking all those useless QUESTIONS."

c) "Danny, you have five-minutes to finish the exam. If you FAIL, you don't graduate. Stay on task or your life is over at eight-years old."

The answer to loss of creativity is Fear of Failure and Fear of Criticism.

The number one desire of humans is a desire to be APPRECIATED, and valued as important, useful to our environment. Criticism creates a fear of failure and is the opposite of appreciation.

Two Elements For Creativity

One, we must give ourselves permission to follow our instinctual CURIOSITY. Parents say NO, five-times more often than YES. We are subliminally taught

to disregard our own opinion, and accept the judgment of others. Follow your natural curiosity.

Second, successful people learn early to have a tolerance for FRUSTRATION.

A student asked me to read her manuscript. She was a superstar in writing Hollywood scripts, but this was a book totally outside her area of proven success.

She showed it to her agent who said, "It was OK, but in my opinion it will never make a dime. Why not stick to what you know, write another script."

Look, he got 10% of her earnings so he really wanted her to succeed. She was not

insulted or deterred, and continued to market her book.

Guess what, she was turned down for publication by 14 other major companies.

She continued to write scripts, but never gave up. She started selling the book

one-at-a-time by making photocopies. Ugly.

Yes, it is one-in-a-million, but later found a publisher and sold a total

of three-million copies internationally of the book no one wanted.

Oh yeah, I thought it was boring too.

Four Ideas on Creativity

Robert Epstein, teaching at University of California, at San Diego lists

four methods leading to creativity.

1. Capturing the original idea before it flies out of your mind and is lost

forever. PDA, Memo Recorder, leave a message to you on your voice mail,

send yourself an Email. Simplest of all, have a pen and paper next to your

bed for capturing ideas after you finish dreaming.

2. Surround yourself with people, places (museums), and things that value

new ideas, inventions and things untested, but with potential.

3. Challenging yourself to grow new ideas. Use-it-or-lose-it applies to your

PFC (prefrontal cortex), the site of cognition and new ideas. Find small challenges

to succeed at like finishing crossword puzzles. Write a fairy tale for your kids.

Try rewriting an article in Psychology Today for your friends.

4. Broadening means trying to learn from people and media outside your

comfort zone. Change your environment and let it lead you into new questions and research. The greater your diversity of knowledge, the greater your creativity.

New Research

The number of hours you watch tv, play video games or watch You Tube stories about dogs and cats, the lower your total of time devoted to Daydreaming.

So what? Daydreaming is a direct source of your creativity and imagination for

new ideas.

Sending your kids off to their room to watch tv is a negative because they

never learn to use their own imagination as a source of amusement and entertainment.

Two parts to successful daydreaming: give permission to your mind to drift into

valuable daydreaming, and actively pay attention to your imagination to latch

on new useful ideas.

Default Network

When you are not actively using your left-hemisphere for reasoning, logic and

planning, your brain rests in its Default Network. It is not sleeping there, but

trying to solve your problems at a subconscious level, and thinking up new ideas.

Dr. Marcus Raichle, Washington University, lead researcher has discovered the

three structures of the Default Network.

First, your medial Frontal Cortex, next, your Parietal Cortex, and third, your

Cingular Cortex.

When you go into Beta cycles per second (Hz), left-hemisphere consciousness,

which includes language and cognition, you Deactivate your Default Network,

and turn your attention to the present and stop daydreaming.

Folks with Alzheimer's do not have the ability to deactivate and lose the present

because their Attention and Concentration is focused on their daydreaming.

Endwords

Team meetings are mostly a waste of time because more than 50% of the members

dread loss of face and sit there and shut down. Fear of criticism silences some great ideas from surfacing to fruition.

Answer: a 15 minute meeting should consist of 5 minutes of group talk to discuss the problem and decide what a solution should contain. Next, 5 minutes (alone) where each member keeps her/his own counsel, and jots down ideas to share later.

Finally the team reassembles and discusses every one's individual ideas to discover what fills the bill. Discuss, not judge the presented ideas.

The standard team meeting is 30-45 minutes all-together-now, where 1-2 members

dominate the presentations. It doesn't work because of varied personalities who

do not want to reveal themselves because of potential criticism. Try the new way.

Coda

Would it increase your personal productivity by reading and remembering three (3)

books, articles and reports, while your peers can hardly finish one? How about doubling your long-term memory? Ask us how.

See ya,

copyright © 2009

H. Bernard Wechsler

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Article Tags: baseball bat, big mouths, boomstick, br music, civilization, creativity, curiosity, exception to the rule, fear of failure, five minutes, imagination, judgment, pay attention, pots and pans, process of socialization, school students, speed reading, treehouse, two elements, villain



Related Forum Posts
Hello all... - Hello everyone - this is just a short intro. My name is Evie Parsons and I'd just like to say hello to everyone. As everybody knows that nowadays forums are the best source of Knowledge, and through forums we can learn a lot. I look forward to meeting you all and wish you the best of success.
Re: Service Or Product? - I agree with starting a Service-based Business in the economy. Here is what I think is critical: 1. Researching that your Service business has a market. 2. Marketing the Service with as much leverage as possible. 3. Product-izing the Service (aka Package Expert Knowledge). This will only help elevate you as "the" expert in your niche and make you accessible to people in different price points.
Re: Franchise of a popular call center - If you have knowledge in running a call center and know how to manage it effectively then it sounds like it’s a good business for you. Workforce management relates to employee matters like payroll, HR, and employee training. Knowledge management relates to research, strategies, innovations and the effective use of technology. In both cases your prime clients are corporate sectors especially those who want to reduce their cost and increase performance at all levels.
Re: 21 Ways To Get New Customers In A Slow Economy - Thanks Evan, Your ideas are full of wisdom required for a time like this. I`ll like to add another idea to your list : Update your Knowledge and Sharpen your Skill on a daily basis. The economy may be considered slow,but customer awareness is on the increase,therefore,if the pocket (disposable income) of the proposed new customer is of any interest to you,then you must stay ahead by at least one step in your skill and knowledge. The 21 ways as listed by Evan is a sure way to increase in knowledge and sharpen you skill.
Re: Is getting a formal education worthwhile for entrepreneu - Knowledge in whatever form is valuable. Its not just about usefulness in the business that you plan to start. The knowledge that you gain via an education system definitely is not enough for an entrepreneur because Facts that you will face in your role as an entrepreneur will be much different than what you have learnt. But having an education will definitely equip you with getting the leads in handling situations. So my suggestion is that you continue with your studies and gain as much knowledge you can. You are already aware that the learnings you make can be applied on the Website. Same also applies for all your other learnings. The only thing is you will have to wait for the time to apply what you have learnt.


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