One idea at a time

There is a view that says that most people can only have one top idea in their mind at one time. When I was writing a report which was overdue, I remember trying to focus on the main ideas in my work but other ideas kept hovering around like pesky gnats constantly distracting me. I finally found the way to keep my mind centered on the big idea was to write down the small ones floating around on a piece of paper on my bedside. It was as if I had finally nailed these pesky gnats and I could now work in peace on my magnum opus. The hard fact is that most people have only one top idea in their mind at any given time as Paul , in an interesting article, insists. That’s the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they’re allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that any form of creative thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it’s a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind. Everyone who’s worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There’s a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I’m increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control your own thoughts only indirectly. Everyone know that you can’t really directly control where your thoughts drift. Therein lies the paradox- if you’re controlling them, they’re not drifting. And if they are not allowed to drift, how will you ever get those great new ideas that light up bulbs. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. You need to try instead to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want think about. You don’t have complete control, of course. An emergency could push other thoughts out of your head. But barring emergencies you have a good deal of indirect control over what becomes the top idea in your mind. And to do that the first thing you have to do is make sure you are not distracted by some kinds of ideas that are peskier than the gnats I mentioned in the begining. There are two types of thoughts especially worth avoiding—thoughts which push out more interesting ideas. The most obdurate one is thinking about money. Anything to do with money is almost by definition an attention sink. I have known people who get up from deep sleep to turn on their computers to figure out if they could buy something cheaper or raise their bid in one of those awful internet auctions. Others just worry about money or lack there of. But if you think about money, you can forget thinking about anything else. The other is disputes. All fights are essentially idea destroyers. They may feel like that they get your creative juices flowing but really there is no real substance to them. There is another aspect of disputes worth thinking about. While disputes themselves are indeed a creative thought sink, it is their aftermath that is even more damaging. Think of it this way – once the dispute is over, you rarely turn it off but instead keep brooding about what you could have done differently to have won the argument. It is here that the old adage of “turning the other cheek” may actually turn out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. You can avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to you by telling yourself: this doesn’t deserve space in your head. If you have forgotten the details of old disputes, you are on way to recovery because that means you have not been thinking about them leaving space for creative thinking instead and for new ideas. I suspect a lot of people aren’t sure what is the top idea in their mind at any given time. Or how to get to be in a position to receive them? In short, how do you become creative? How do you get to that top idea in your mind. First don’t think about money, second avoid disputes or if you have them, get over them quickly. But to get the real top idea, go take a shower, for the ideas you have in the shower will really be the top ones!