Photo by @prophsee
Having completed a long list of factors that make change difficult, the next few chapters are about the difficulties in choosing a worthy goal.
If only I could find a creative solution to my problem, I would be so much happier.
How many times in the past have you felt this way ? Sometimes we think we have come up with a creative solution but more often than not, nothing much changes. It’s like the software engineer’s curse. Fixing one bug creates another one or uncovers a dormant one and life continues much the same as before.
A cynical view, maybe, but the extreme has been chosen to uncover the average. Your daily problem fixing has kept you…… fixing problems.
Where are the really great ideas ?
People think thinking is having ideas. No. Thinking is having new ideas.
In the chapter on “Thoughts” we saw how our thoughts are just regurgitated thoughts and impressions from our past or from other people. So when we say we are “thinking”, we are usually just “thoughting”.
Thoughting, as the name suggests, is just old thoughts in a new bottle. If you have had a problem for a while, it is likely that these thoughts won’t cut it.
To get good really good ideas, you should discard the first 10 that come to you.
The common thread
Is it enough if we just discard old ideas? Unfortunately NO.
The new ideas will still be a product of the future you are living into. These ideas may look different but they are still connected to old thoughts by the assumptions you have baked into the future you are living into.
These assumptions are hard to weed out, because for you, they are not assumptions, they are truths. These assumptions are the blind spots about which your life pivots. They are the things that “You don’t know” AND “You don’t even know that you don’t know”.
Things you don’t know that you don’t know
By controlling your thoughts, your blind spots control your life.
While it’s super easy to see blind spots in others, it’s very hard to find our own blind spots. The reason being, that you don’t think of them as blind spots. On the contrary, they are pillars of your life.
“I am bad at math” is a blind spot for many people. It stops them from attempting any kind of mathematical activity and sometimes relegates them to low paying jobs. What they don’t know and what they don’t even know that they don’t know is that they can learn maths with practice. Everyone can learn maths.
Pike’s syndrome
An experiment was conducted with a pike fish and a tank of water. In the beginning, the pike was given full access to the complete tank. Food was always placed on the left side of the tank after a suitable disturbance to catch the fish’s attention. After a while a transparent sheet was placed between the fish and the area where the food was placed.
This time, when the disturbance was made and the food offered, the pike hit the transparent sheet and was not able to get to the food.
This was repeated at every meal time. After a while the pike stopped trying to get to the food and continued to swim in its side of the tank. The thin sheet was, later, quietly removed. Yet still, when the food was dropped into the left side of the tank, the pike ignored it and continued swimming on it’s side of the tank. In fact the pike never again swam into the left side of the tank and later died of starvation.
Some time in your growing years, you made a decision, similar to the pike’s. That decision reduced your freedom to express yourself, but even as you got older, you didn’t re-evaluate that decision and that decision became part of the future you are living into and your blind spot.
“I am lazy”, “I am worthless”, “I don’t interact well with people”, “people hate me” are all blind spots. We don’t analyse these statements, we take them as fact and live our lives within the confines created by them.
The real danger with these blind spots is that they control your perspective of life. The blind spots collect evidence to support their “truth”. For example, if you have the blind spot “people hate me” you will see evidence in the world around you to support that worldview…. even if there isn’t really any evidence out there! This is also why people are not easily convinced that they have blind spots!
Creativity begins
Real creativity, the kind that will really solve your problems and take you to the next level in your life, begins with understanding that you are not creative by default.
We are creatures of habit. We do the same actions, think the same thoughts, feel the same feelings over and over and over again. Yet we want our world to change.
As we really can’t trust ourselves to be creative, we need someone who can make us try new things or approaches. This is why we need coaches or mentors. We need someone else to observe us as we go through our day and just give us new ideas.
If you don’t have access to a coach or mentor, then try and read books. Books are collections of thoughts and experiences of other people which could trigger new ideas. Read widely and with abandon. Read things you don’t like, read different genres - poetry, game theory, statistics. Read and take down notes, but remember that what you absorb from a book will be filtered by the future you are living into.
Creativity begins when you realise that you are not creative.