Month: August 2015

Whole Brain Creativity

Are you a right-brain person or a left-brain person?

Right brain folks are more artistic, feeling, intuitive, and creative — they like to find solutions by making connections and trusting their intuition. Left brain folks are more rational and logical — they like order, data, facts, guarantees, and reliability.

But there is more than just left-brain or right-brain types of people. There are actually four types of thinking (or learning) styles.

The two researchers in this are that I’m most familiar with are Ned Herrmann and Anthony Gregorc. Gregorc created what he calls the Mind Styles Model. Herrmann created what he calls Whole Brain Thinking.

If you break the two hemispheres down even further, as Ned Herrmann, Anthony Gregorc, and many others have done, then you get the four quadrants of the brain. Each of us has a dominant quadrant that we think and learn from — a way of thinking and percieving the world that is most natural to us. But each of us can use all four quadrants.

Herrmann - Whole Brain Thinking

Herrmann uses colors to define the four quadrants: Blue, Green, Red, and Yellow. Gregorc’s quadrants each have a name based on the way people perceive and order information: Abstract Sequential, Concrete Sequential, Abstract Random, and Concrete Random.

Gregorc’s AS, CS, AR, and CR quadrants correlate to Herrmann’s Blue, Green, Red, and Yellow quadrants pretty easily.

  1. Blue (Abstract Sequential) is where logical, analytical, and technical thinking happens. Blue thinkers are the ones making sure we don’t value form over function because they are rational and care about performance and analytics. They are objective, thorough, quantitative and technical. They’ve probably got a mental calculator ready to go, which is why they tend to be engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc.

  2. Green (Concrete Sequential) is where people are detailed, organized, administrative, reliable, and structured. They are tactical, and tend to be project managers, bookkeepers, and administrators because they value control, structure, reliability, and tradition.

  3. Red (Abstract Random) is where you find emotional, expressive, interpersonal, and spiritually-minded people. They are compassionate, perceptive, and sensitive. They care deeply about people, and they have the ability to read the emotional temperature of a room right when they walk in. They tend to be teachers, trainers, charity workers, and musicians so they can help others and frequently connect on a personal level in and through their career.

  4. Yellow (Concrete Random) is where creative, artistic, and conceptual thinking happen. These people are usually visionary and risk taking and tend to become entrepreneurs, artists, and strategists. They value spontaneity, risk, beauty, design, and fun. They are also excellent at recognizing patterns, and have a strong ability to form connections between two or more seemingly contrasting ideas.

If you’re at all familiar with these (and other) styles, then you know that I’m grossly oversimplifying the science behind these things. And I bet Gregorc and Herrmann wouldn’t be too happy with me comparing their two models so closely. (But I can’t help it. I’m a strong Yellow thinker, so I like connecting ideas and finding patterns.)

But I’m not here to do a deep dive on the science of learning, thinking, etc.

What strikes me about the whole brain model is that it highlights the different joys and challenges of creativity.

Each of us are dominant in one of these four quadrants. You, dear reader, have some strength and some weakness of all four quadrants of learning and thinking style, but one of them is your most dominant. Do you mostly thrive on: Facts and logic? Form and Safety? Feelings and relationships? Or future ideas and concepts?

However, for us to do our best creative work — work that matters — we have to operate out of all four quadrants.

Operating out of all four quadrants looks different for everyone because everyone has one or two quadrants that they are strongest in and then a few quadrants they are weaker in.

If you are a strong “Yellow” thinker, then having visionary creative solutions is probably a natural part of your everyday life. But you may have trouble when it comes time to execute on your ideas.

Or if you are a strong “Green” thinker, then you can whip up a plan while the coffee is still brewing. But you may have trouble seeing the big picture, or understanding it’s significance.

We will always naturally operate out of our dominant quadrant. But our best creative work must flow out of all four quadrants. We need to have a desire to problem solve (Blue), we need to have enough structure and organization in order to show up every day (Green), we need to have empathy and emotion toward others and a desire to help them (Red), and we need care about creating and making (Yellow).

In addition to our own individual need to think and work using all four quadrants, we can also benefit greatly from having people around us who are dominant in different areas. If you are a strong red thinker, then get someone who is blue to work beside. While you may have friction at first (you will see them as being cold and calculating; they will see you as being too talkative and sentimental), you will actually bring some healthy balance to one another and make more progress as a team.

The challenge is to operate out of the areas of our brain that don’t come naturaly to us. Are your creative solutions intuitive? Do they solve a problem? Are you able to show up every day and do the work? Are you trying to serve and delight others?

To do work that matters, answering ‘yes’ to just one or even two of these is not enough.

In the same way that our best creative work flows from all four quadrants, it must also flow to all four quadrants for it to be effective in reaching others.

Whole Brain Creativity

Building Better Defaults

As you know, I’ve been working for myself from home for over four years. And even still, I’m terrible at estimating how much time I need to spend on a particular task.

At first, my bad time estimations would frustrate my wife. She’d ask me how long until I was done working and I’d think about how I had just three more emails left in my inbox and how I could probably get them triaged in 5 minutes. But then an hour would go by…

Fortunately my wife has learned to take my time estimations and quadruple them. Because I still frequently overestimate what I can get done in a short amount of time. And, like many others, I also tend to underestimate what I can accomplish over an extended season.

It’s a backwards problem. Not only does it put all the emphasis on “how much” I can do today — it also means I get frustrated when I can’t get everything done that’s on my massive, never-ending, to-do list.

When my emphasis is on today’s quantity of tasks accomplished, it leads me to de-value the little actions that have great impact over time. The little things that ultimately lead to incremental yet consistent progress and thus accomplishing a lot over an extended season.

If you know anything about investing you know it’s far better to invest $100 every month for 30 years then to invest $36,000 all at once three decades from now.

Assuming an 8% rate of return, if you invested a mere $100/month for 30 years then your investment would be worth $135,939.

However, if you waited until the very end of those 30 years and then tried to invest all $36,000 at once then your investment would be worth exactly that: $36,000. You’d miss out on $100,000 worth of compounding interest. Not to mention the fact that it’s a lot harder to come up with $36,000 all at once than it is to come up with $100 consistently.

This principle is true for all the investments of our lives. It extends far beyond just finances. It’s true for our relationships, our vocation and our career, our art, our education, even our physical health.

Doing a little bit on a regular basis is far more powerful than doing a whole lot at once. It’s also far more sustainable.

But we despise doing a little bit on a regular basis. We live in a culture that craves microwave results. And thus, we have acquired a thirst for instant gratification.

For example, we want to get healthier, but the idea of starting a routine of walking for just 15 minutes a day doesn’t motivate us — we despise how simple and humble that approach is. And so instead we buy a gym membership, hire a personal trainer, spend $500 on new workout clothes and fancy armbands to hold our iPhones, and we commit to 2 hours a day 6 days a week. Then we burn out in a few weeks time never to exercise again.

Only a fool would deposit $100 into a savings account and come back the next day expecting it to have grown to $200. It’s not until years later that the account begins to see the exponential return on the investment. We know that financial investments and the growth of compound interest takes time — so too the investments we make in the rest of our lives.

One of the personal challenges of doing small things consistently over time is that we don’t naturally choose them. In the moment, we would rather spend that $100 on a new toy or a nice dinner instead of investing it.

We tell ourselves that it’s only $100, and that spending it instead of investing it just this one time doesn’t really hurt anything. But it does hurt. And the reason it hurts is because it makes spending the $100 next time all the easier. And before long, it’s been a decade and we’ve yet to invest a dime.

Clearly, there is value in small things done consistently over time.

Which means that our most basic actions and seemingly inconsequential routines are actually the key players moving our life in whatever direction it is going.

Ben Franklin said, “Human felicity is produced not as much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day.”

What are these little advantages that occur every day?

They are the daily habits and lifestyle choices we make.

For a while we have choose them — sometimes on purpose and sometimes not. But then, after a few weeks or a few months they begin to choose us back. And over time, they become deeply rooted. We just do them.

This is great news for our good habits! It means that if we begin to implement something healthy and helpful into our lifestyle, then over time it will become second nature to us.

But our deep-rooted routines can be a nightmare if they are things we don’t want to be doing. Such as a poor diet, unhealthy relationship with our spouse or loved ones, inability to manage money, etc.

We don’t all have the physical and mental willpower to make great decisions all day every day. In fact, as the day goes along, we slowly lose our willpower.

When I was in high school, after classes my friends and I would walk back to my house and we’d just sit around doing nothing.

One person would ask: “So, what do you guys want to do?” And someone else would respond: “I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

None of us could think of any ideas for what to do. Nor could any of us make a decision. It’s not just that we were teenage dudes — we were also mentally tired from a full day of school.

Even now, 15 years later, when my work day is done, I just want to collapse on the couch and not make any decisions or think about anything.

When you’re in this tired state is the moment when your lifestyle habits take over. Whatever your default actions, behaviors, and decisions are, these are the things you will do when you are low on willpower and your decision-making ability is fatigued.

I think this is a huge reason why the average American spends 5 hours or more watching television every day.

He or she comes home from the day feeling tired and doesn’t want to think about what to do. So he or she simply turns on the television and pretty soon the whole evening has been spent watching sitcoms and crime dramas.

Over time (which can be as quickly as a few weeks for some, but takes about 8 weeks for most) the act of watching TV every night after work becomes a routine. It turns into a lifestyle habit. That person’s mind and body expect to watch TV and even look forward to it. It’s a habit — a reflex.

Now, I’m not here to preach that 5 hours of TV every day is bad (you can figure that one out for yourself).

You can do whatever you want with your time. But… if you were to choose how you would prefer to spend your week which one of these options would you pick?

  1. Watch 35 hours of television.
  2. Write 7,000 words toward your next book.
  3. Encourage 7 of your closest friends and family members.
  4. Read 7 chapters of a book.
  5. Walk 7 miles.

I know some of you will say that watching 35 hours of TV per week is your preferred way to spend your time. But I bet most of you would choose to write, read, connect with others, or stay healthy.

Now, what if I told you that you could trade the 35 hours of television for the other 4 tasks combined?

35 hours of TV is equal to 5 hours every day for 7 days.

With those same 5 hours each day, you’d have time to spend one whole hour writing, one whole hour encouraging someone over email or making a phone call, one whole hour to read a chapter from a book, one whole hour to walk a mile around your neighborhood, and still have one whole hour to spare (heck you could use that last hour to watch an episode of your favorite show).

You can do a lot in 5 hours. Especially if you break it up into small routines.

It sounds ridiculous that someone could get so much done every day when they’re so used to getting nothing done. But it’s not ridiculous. It just requires building better defaults.

If you choose something long enough, eventually it will choose you back. The same way your mind and your body looked forward to turning on the TV when you got home from work, so too will your mind and body learn to look forward to reading, writing, walking, and encouraging others.

Leo Babauta wrote about how his most important things (writing, meditation, reading, email processing, workouts, meals) he doesn’t even have to think about. He’s built them into his day as defaults.

I cannot stress enough the importance of having your most important work be a part of your daily routine.

There are two quotes that I use often throughout The Focus Course:

“People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.”
— F.M. Alexander

“You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.”
— John C. Maxwell

By far and away, if you have more ideas than time but more time than attention, the best way to keep the needle moving forward is to have smarter “defaults” for how your spend your time and energy. Keep choosing the right actions and attitudes until they choose you back.

Building Better Defaults

Concerning the Ebb and Flow of “Work”

As I write this, I’m preparing to spend a week in the mountains. And, in fact, by the time you read this I’ll already be in the mountains.

Up until this point, the entirety of 2015 I spent working on The Focus Course. Now that it has shipped, I’m taking some time away from work.

When you rest well, it should leave you feeling recharged and re-energized, ready to get back to work. I love to work. I love creating things and connecting with people. But work needs and ebb and and a flow.

I’ve discovered that I work best with seasons where my focus is solely on the idea and task at hand. Where I eat, sleep, and breath one particular project. And then, I need time away from work. To give my mind space to breath.

Perhaps you can relate, or perhaps you think I’m crazy, but taking time off isn’t easy for me. My tendency is to work, work, work.

Though I don’t let my work time come before my family time, I do have to remind myself that even my working hours aren’t all about “creating”. It took me several years before I realized it was just as important for me to read, study, and learn as it was for me to write, make, and ship.

In this short and sweet interview with Cameron Moll, he shares about his work and life as a designer and the founder of Authentic Jobs. I love this quote:

I was always building stuff with my hands growing up. Like always. Wood projects, go-karts, radio-controlled airplanes, that sort of thing. I think we underestimate sometimes just how much those kinds of activities, the ones that seem completely unrelated to our careers, play a vital role in shaping who we become and what we do with our working lives. The tools I use now in business are totally different from those I used in my garage twenty years ago, but in the end they’re all the same. They’re just tools that facilitate synthesis and creativity. And ten or twenty years from now, those tools will be totally different again. Mastery of creation and composition is much more important than mastery of tools.

I love that sentiment: “Mastery of creation and composition is much more important than mastery of tools.”

Here, Cameron is talking about the tools we use to build things. But I believe that this could also be applied to our workflows and our lifestyles as well. That mastery of creation is much more important than mastery of workflows.

We often ask people about the tools they use to get the job done. We’re curious about their work routines, their schedule, their priorities, etc.

But we rarely ask them what they are doing to stay sharp. What do they do in their off time? What hobbies to they keep? What does their family life look like? How do they spend their free time?

Who we are and what we do when we are away from our most important work is just as important as the energy and focus we give to doing that work. Because we are who we are, everywhere we are. Eating a healthy meal, having a good night’s sleep, telling our spouses that we love them — all these things impact the quality of the work we produce.

The lines between work and life are much more blurry than we like to imagine.

Another article I read just recently is this story about how William Dalrymple writes his books.

It takes Dalrymple 3-4 years to write a book. The first 2-3 years are spent reading, researching traveling. Then, the final year is spent writing.

Dalrymple shares about how his writing year is “completely different from the others”. He stops going out much. He gets up at 5:30 every morning to write. He works out in his back shed where there is no internet connection. He doesn’t look at his cell phone or email until after lunch.

In the final year I go from a rambling individual to almost autocratically, fixatedly hardworking and focused and that is the one discipline of being a writer. One year in four or five you are completely eaten up by the book. If it’s working, you’re really dreaming it, it’s not a figure of speech, it’s a literal thing. You’re harnessing the power of your subconscious.

As artists we so often hear about these seasons of other artists’ lives: the intense, focused, eat-sleep-work seasons. And we think that this is what life is like all the time.

But it can’t be. Dalrymple couldn’t spend a year focused on his writing without the preceding 2-3 years of reading, researching, and traveling.

You have to be inspired first before you can create.

You have to learn before you can teach.

You have to experience before you can share.

There is no shame in taking time “off” of your work, in order to learn something, experience something, and be inspired.

This is the ebb and flow of work. This is having multi-year cycles where we grow in our mastery of creation beyond just mastery of tools and workflows. This is why resting well is so valuable and why learning, thinking, and discovering cannot be underrated.

 

* * *

 

P.S. Just a side note to mention that the challenges of work-life balance, fighting a sense of overwhelm, and giving ourselves space to think and margin for thought are all foundational topics to The Focus Course. If this article hits home for you, I bet you would find immense value in taking 40 days to work your way through the course.

Concerning the Ebb and Flow of “Work”