Inquisitive Report 25/52

Week Ending July 20th, 2018

Content Covered: Ideation & Creativity

---

I believe in leveraging our biology – and by extension neurology, to help us create happiness, love, productivity and insight in our lives.

Recently, I read an article on memory & creativity and it inspired me to create a few habits that I have been practicing and will continue to practice for the next few weeks.

My habits:

• I am creative, when I wake up in the morning and before I look at the phone, I drink water and spend 10 minutes free writing about Xpanse.
• I am a connector, when I lay in the bed I spend a few moments synthesizing what I learnt today and how it applies to Xpanse.

The science behind these two habits is broken down for you in the article, for our purposes I’m going to highlight a few key points for you to consider if you decide to leverage your neurology to accomplish your goals.

Before Sleeping

Throughout the day you’ve been learning, experience and absorbing information. Before we fall asleep at night, if we take a few moments to recollect the key events of our day – and how they tie to a particular goal you are trying to achieve (in my case establishing Xpanse) what we are doing is in affect creating new ‘potential pathways’ for insight.

By connecting new information to existing information in our brains, we increase the likelihood of not only remembering the data, but also finding new insights.

To truly leverage this ability, they say that visualizing and engaging the senses will allow you to engrain that experience more deeply into your long term memory.

And once in your long-term memory, it becomes subconscious, and thus far more powerful than something you have to consciously focus on; when something becomes unconscious, it begins connecting itself to other areas of your brain, other ideas, and other memories.*

After You Wake Up

When you wake up in the morning, your subconscious mind has been loosely mind-wandering while you slept, making contextual and temporal connections. Thus, your brain and mind are primed for creation and learning.*

To leverage the ‘work’ that your brain has been doing behind the scenes, when you wake up in the morning find a quiet place and start writing in “stream-of-consciousness manner,” this means write down whatever is in your brain (related to the topic of your goal).

The key here is that: once you start getting an idea, you should keep writing. Often times when we are trying to ‘create’ we stop at the first ‘good’ idea; but in doing so we loose out on several other insights.

My personal recommendations is to start with a set time – keep the margin a bit bigger than you think you’d be able to write for (say 20 minutes); watch how this works for you over the next few days, and adjust accordingly. Currently I’m at about 10 minutes of free writing in the morning, but I think I will increase it a bit because I see that my thoughts keep running even when the timer goes off 🙂

Overall, when all is said and done – my personal goal is to leverage all the thoughts and ideas that I have in my brain, create those connections and then be able to express and execute on them. I believe following these two habits will increase my chances of achieving all that – and so far I have to say it’s working quite well, perhaps you’d like to try it out for yourself?

---

*Quotes taken directly from article