Think Outside The Box

Think Outside Your Head

I saw this funny video the other day.

The kind where you want to use as few brain cells as possible.

It was this dog, who had this box. The way he was holding the box, was all he could see was the inside of the box.

So he kept walking around in circles, bumping into things.

Because he was a dog, and not an astrophysicist, he didn’t think to put the box down, take a look around, and then choose another strategy.

There are lots of videos like that. Cats, dogs, all acting goofy.

But we humans, who often times fancy ourselves as superheroes of logic and scientific thinking, don’t often do much better.

Sure, we convince ourselves that we’re giving it our best shot, but most of the time, we’re like that poor dog.

Crashing into things, but we just back up a bit, and then crash into them again.

Naturally, it can be tough to tell if you’re really doing the same thing or not.

Because humans, we’re doing things a little bit more complicated than walking with a box in our mouths.

We’re interacting with other humans, or other complicated systems.

And as the saying goes, “you can’t step in the same river twice,” every time we interact with the system, even if we ARE blinding doing the same thing over and over, the SYSTEM is changing, so it actually is possible to get a different result.

In the short term, this is pretty good. Just back up, try again and keep going until you get it right.

But every time you succeed with this strategy, it actually reinforces the idea of doing the same thing over and over.

Short term, pretty good. Long term, not so good.

A lot of times it’s better to simply try something different. Sometimes a little different, sometimes a LOT different.

This can be frustrating. Because once you change something, you’ll feel a little uncomfortable.

And when you feel uncomfortable, you’ll be much more sensitive to things that “seem” like failure, but are really feedback.

Or you’ll more likely to “interpret” feedback AS failure, rather than feedback.

One way make this a LOT easier is to simply expand your thinking.

Learn to think in different ways, so you’ll see things differently.

Then taking different action will seem a lot easier.

Kind of like discovering a new route to work that’s quicker and easier.

You aren’t driving around blindly hoping to find a new way, you’re using your enhanced thinking skills to FIND a new way so you don’t have to stumble around.

The more you work on your mental skills, the easier it will be to “try on” different behavioral skills, you’ll be able to get a lot more cool stuff.

(Or meet more people or make more money or whatever you want.)

Learn How:
Intelligence Accelerator

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

CAPTCHA