#1 - Do Something Else

A good practice for innovative thinking is something you can do dozens of times every day. When you are about to do something, any old trivial thing will do, wait till the last second, then do something else entirely. For example, are you reaching for that spoon to plunge into the open peanut better jar? Instead grab the fork! Planning to lift your right foot up on that tree stump? Instead lift up your left!
This is called peripeteia and squirrels have evolved it to evade predators. You never know what a squirrel will do next. There are hundreds of arbitrary and irrelevant decisions you make in a day, where you can easily do something else. On impulse, in an instant, with no fore thought. This helps to sharpen your improvisation abilities, and gets you out of any ruts. Why were you so set on using the spoon anyway? Perhaps you will find that the fork works better. Trying out new ways and ducking out of the old ways is a good exercise.

#2 - Listen With Your Eyes

The most frequent piece of advice given is "listen." Listening is easy to explain, simple to understand, and everyone can benefit from doing more. Right? But what if you're one of those people who are already listening? And you don't need to do any more? Is this generic advice wasted on you? Where do you go from here?

The next step is to listen with your eyes. Look closely at people, at the color, fabric and style of their clothes, their shoes, objects and hair. What events led up to this? What had to happen for them to look this way? What pain are they hoping to avoid, what's hurting them? And especially, What's important to them?

People are constantly showing you their true self, in all that they say and everything they do. What does it feel like to be them? Defining and judging others in seconds flat doesn't help you understand them. Everyone speaks and lives in their own dialect, too complex to easily grasp. The best piece of advice I was ever given in life is: "Look closer." And besides, listening with your eyes is a type of synesthesia, and that's something we can all benefit from doing more.

#3 - Sharpen Your Intuition

Let's say you meet someone, or learn an idea, or encounter a new situation. You will have some snap feelings and opinions, that happen faster than your thoughts. These are the perceptions you want to sharpen, so they'll work better next time, accurate first impressions come in handy. You're going to have biases, prejudices and distortions, and the usual ones will show up most often. Things that have been hammered into you from your past. Correcting your tired old biases will make you faster, more accurate, and you'll have room for new distortions. Don't fool yourself into thinking that you can erase them, they will happen and honestly improving them is the best course.

If you haven't done it already, learn how to think without words. This may take some time, so the sooner you start the better. When you can stop the words in your mind, and encounter something new, stop your internal dialogue and become pure perception. This will give you more speed, richer observations, and your amygdalas will record what happens next in a separate memory of emotions.

You want to record your first impressions into a special type of memory that you have built for yourself. One that's very fast, and able to hold the fastest snapshot you can do. Make a flash inspection of all your reactions to this new thing, and remember it in a special place. Now go about your business and live your life with this new person, place or thing. Learn what they're like over time. Then one day you will have an epiphany: you will understand the new thing at a deeper level, or from a higher vantage point. Now you retrieve the memory of your first impression, and hold it and the current insight in your mind at one time. This gives your brain a chance to compare, so it sharpens your intuition. You are now closer to having long term insights at first viewing.

#4 - Your Semantic Vocabulary

We all love to come up with new ideas and create great things. This insight mechanism, that all of us share, acts like an integrator. It takes in heaps of facts from all over, and assembles them together in darkness. At some point a wave function collapses, a crazy burst appears, and you have your epiphany. The "manys" that go in, become the "ones" that come out. If you want to make a profound, clever and popular invention, then it helps to dwell on lots of profound and clever ideas in your run-up to the light bulb moment.

If your typical weekly diet of ideas is made up of unlikely fantasies, grudges, guilty pleasures, and enjoying nastiness, then your insight is going to be thin and stinky. It probably won't go very far or appear very often. Did you think you can produce a big idea while dwelling on immature junk? To have better insights, think about higher quality ideas. This is called your semantic language, it's the routines and infrastructure of your mind that happens while you are looking. Increasing your semantic vocabulary, and polishing it, will produce much better results in the epiphany department. You're probably stuck in some historic ruts and never think about changing it. Believing you can make these changes is an essential skill.

So all you have to do is find some profound ideas, hold them and juggle them in your mind, and you will come up with better inventions. But how do you know which ideas are profound? Sales and marketing knowledge, which is very expensive, was all about upselling a while ago, and now it's about excess politeness. There’s no stability there, despite the high price tag! Better, and cheaper, sorts of profound ideas can be found in physics, math and logic, guild and trades techniques, stories, memoirs and allegories. Include imaginary stuff if that's what your insight will be, otherwise stick to real stuff if you want to make something real.

Increasing your semantic vocab puts you somewhat in the driver's seat when it comes to having creative insights. Now you can make aesthetic decisions about how you want your invention to be, and expose yourself to ideas from that genre. The resulting insights will carry the flavor of what you put in. Learn to be aware when you encounter a profound idea. Time will slow down, and a dozen episodes when the idea was present will flash through your mind.
If you can’t see the profound ideas around you, you’re probably blocked by your ego, distracted by your life, or caught in turbulent thought. Build up your own semantic language today, because profounder thoughts make bigger ideas!

#5 - Don't Look Away

Years ago I was standing around at a party when the front door opened and several people stepped in. One was a woman that I made eye contact with and we both smiled. As she stepped in fully, I saw that she was very different from me. She wore different clothes, and was from another culture. The same thought had apparently occurred to her, and we both almost looked away. But I thought that would be disrespectful, and I never liked treating people like they were invisible anyway, so I kept up the eye contact and the smiling.

And she smiled back. Later, we chatted on the back porch and had some good laughs. By then I had learned my lesson, and I have never looked away from someone, like they were not good enough for me, ever since. Others have looked away from me countless times, but that’s the choice they make. I choose to look and smile, and that works for me.

It’s the same way with innovation. Let’s say you’re struggling to solve a problem with some technology, and something is missing. If the door opens and in steps a magnetic field, or a fan, or a dos .bat file, you might feel the urge to look away and ignore it. But those things could be just the ticket and solve lots of problems at once. So the next time you’re out with people, practice respecting them and sharpening your inventing game at the same time, and don’t look away.

#6 - Imagine a Javelin

When you’re at the track and field meet, competing in the javelin competition, all your focus is on the moment when you heave that thing into the air. It’s like throwing out a suggestion, a bowling ball, a business pitch, or a dart. All the work you’ve put into training, rehearsing and trying your best has just left your hand and is now flying away.

During the next suspenseful moments you may feel an urge to shout, punch the air, contort your torso or clench your bum. Don't give in to it! It’s not going to change the outcome you know. You can’t grab a hair dryer or a fireplace bellows, aim it at the receding shape and hope to change its flight path. You can only wait and see what happens. Why not use this time to contemplate the necessity of striving, the folly of pessimism, and consider getting more variety into your life.

Fretting, worrying and getting irked are not productive, and unlikely to improve your next toss. So just relax, taste the air, feel the light, appreciate the beauty and enjoy the thrill of being alive. The importance we attach to things is hilarious, and no one could blame you if you burst out laughing and slapped your knee in glee. It’s the same way with life.

If you’re waiting for the bus, your patent application, or the verdict in your trial, just imagine a javelin thrown into the air. Soon it will land where it will, and when it does you will know by the roar of the crowd.

#7 - Time Travel

Some events happen over long periods of time. Like galaxies for example. A while after the big bang, galaxies pooled together, did some exploding, then built lots of nebulae, stars and planets. Some of them hung out in clusters, and a few passed through another with collisions and interactions. Now they’re getting so far away from each other, they’ll never see each other again. The galactic timescale is pretty big.

A smaller timescale is the history of our solar system. The sun coalesced and ignited, the planets formed, then meteors, asteroids, moons and finally spaceships.
Then came the history of the Earth. In foaming ponds close to volcanos, meteorites exploded overhead, and one celled life began.
Nothing much happened then except making oxygen. Two billion years of primitive life kept making oxygen until there was enough. Then came the history of animals, a lot happened in the next 100 million years. Drama, joy and tragedy.
Recorded history, the history of your country, your family, your life, your career, this year, today, the last few minutes, and what feels like now. As many time scales as there have been getting to this point, there are even more moving towards the pinpoint of the real now.

The realm of fractions of a second is vast. Sound waves, radio, radiation, light, all have their own times. The smallest unit of time anything can be aware of is the Planck Time: 5.39 times 10 to the minus 44 seconds. Anything can happen in the next Planck Time, where uncertainty becomes 100%. We can wonder what happened after the big bang, but nothing will ever know what happened in the first Planck Time.

Learn to be aware of periods of time and the events that happen across them. Your product will be viable for so long on the market, it will take so long to develop it, and the idea first came to you in an instant. Being able to time travel can help you avoid getting stuck, moving too fast or getting into arguments. Time travelling is easy, you’ve always known how!

#8 - The Reason Why

When Winston Churchill was asked to cut funding for the arts to bolster wartime spending, he might have said, “Then what are we fighting for?” But he didn’t. We don’t even know who made that up. Still, it’s a pretty good question. We put a lot of effort into being alive, and give up a lot along the way to being dead, so why do we do it? What are we fighting for?

While the reason is different for everyone, we can all benefit from reminding ourselves what “it” is, to stay strong and committed to the battles ahead. It’s also good to give yourself a little taste of reward to keep yourself fed. But not so much that you topple over. For example:

You can talk to, comfort, and help an animal. Listen to some music or make your own. Get out into nature and enjoy the view, taste the air and bathe in the light. Be with people you love or at least like a lot. Have some great food or make your own. Do something you’ve been putting off: dancing, singing in the choir, designing your invention or darning those socks.

Say nice things and be generous to people, make someone’s day. Watch a good movie instead of putting up with junk. Exercise, sweat, make love and shower. Write your story, interrupt a loudmouth, swear, scream, and tell an intense truth without restraint. Enjoy the world, heal it and fight evil. These are some things that work for me.

Remember what you enjoy and what you find beautiful, because that is what you fight for. Keeping yourself reminded of this will help you to invent.

#9 - The Prime Salient

Insights, Epiphanies, Light Bulb and Pole Vaulting moments, we all have them.
Some insights are minor, like
“Oh no, I forgot to buy the toilet paper!”
And sometimes they’re major, as in:
“An app that helps you rate other apps, this will be huge!”
Big insights that reach across far flung ideas, peoples and times, are known as epiphanies, and when a memorable light bulb moment is the start of an innovation project, it’s called the prime salient.

Not every product or invention is born from a prime salient, but those that are, have a better chance of succeeding.

So now that you’ve had a remarkable insight, what do you do with it? Better watch out for unquestioned loyalty. Epiphanies pack an emotional punch and that’s good for motivation, but that can also make them sticky and prone to either irrational worship, or the other kind.

In Circus Tent https://lnkd.in/gsEMQe6g a solution to loyalty is seen from a quantum pov. Sometimes the prime salient will indicate a valuable transformation but can’t take you there because it’s flawed. But some other mechanism might, so then you’ll have to invent the invention to move forward.

The mainstream technique of dealing with a prime salient is to pass it by many people who research, sharpen and modify it. Test it out, fret and hedge, then finally release it as a product. Most get tossed. All those things can also be done inside your own head, so the first time others hear about it, is version 4.2 for you.

How about looking closely at the moment of the epiphany? See what worked, and plan to have a better one next time? People who are fast and perceptive are confidant about their ability to have epiphanies. While people who are mystified by them are insecure, and want to drown them in darkness.

Bigger insights are easier to launch and more likely to be profitable. How you react to, and navigate your mind in a critical few seconds will make the difference between success and failure. Do you remember the exact time and place when your epiphany hit you? That's a good sign.

#10 - Dealing With Geese

There’s a nearby park I go to that’s a nursery for geese. There are rows of still ponds where families raise broods of young chicks. They grow up fast, getting steadily larger over the spring months. There are several sand ramps leading to the water, an open area for assemblies, and some tree nooks for private conversations. It's ideal.
Weeks before, I had seen these same parents out on a group date, flying up and down the river. Four ganders and 4 gooses tested each other out in pairs. They chose as best they could, and now here they are bringing up families.
The geese have a reputation for being ornery, often confronting park goers and squawking loudly. They even have their own online group “Canada Geese are Jerks” dedicated to stories and videos of big birds behaving badly.
I have evolved a method of dealing with them that gives great results every time.
Let’s say you suddenly encounter a group of geese slow marching across your path, and they start squawking. First locate the male who’s on duty, whose task is to watch out for the flock. He’ll be squawking the loudest and trying to make eye contact with you. Locate and apologize to him.
Say “I’m sorry! I didn’t know! Please forgive me, I’m a just a stupid person!”
Put your hands in your pockets and bow a little. He’ll calm down and so will the rest.

Keep apologizing and showing deference and soon he’ll put on a display of boss like posing.
“BACK off there human! Yer damn right you are! You stay put you!” kind of thing.
He’ll start checking out the other geese, to make sure they’re watching this. Play to them too, assure them that their big male has got you slobbering your shirt and you're not a threat at all. They will be impressed and he’ll be grateful for your proper conduct. With only an occasional squawk, he will usher his charges across the path, and everyone leaves unhurt.
It’s just like that in real life. Don’t think about your relationship with the head goose, think about his relationships in his flock. Make him admired by his people so he’s grateful to you. Then everyone scores a win.
Communicating like this to geese requires strong focus, fast speed, surrender, and believing it can happen.

#11 - The Gift Of Gratitude

Years ago in my mid 20’s, I spent a summer in New Rochelle installing wood stoves with my friend Bob. One day there was no work, so I headed into the big city, because back then I was still curious about those things.
I walked the path through the backyards and came out on the street. There was a paving crew slowly approaching, laying down new asphalt. In a parked car was a woman who waved and called me over.
“Young man! My car needs a boost and the paving crew will tow me away if I don’t get one soon! Do you know anyone who can save me a big towing bill?”
Boy did I ever! “Hang on lady, I’ll be right back!” I ran back the way I came, and up the stairs into Bob’s house.
”Bob! There’s a lady trapped on the street who needs a boost!”
”What?” shouted Bob, leaping to his feet, “We must save her!” he cried and pointed his arm into the air. We ran down the stairs to the truck. We knew all about needing a boost because the truck had a bad alternator, and we often had to push it to get it going.
Sure enough it wouldn’t start, so we leapt out and pushed the big Suburban up to the top of the driveway, our faces beet red and sweating, jumped in, and as it coasted down the hill the engine roared to life. We whipped around the corner and there she was, in greater peril now with the paving crew drawing ever closer.
With booster cables at the ready, we started her car and Bob went back to doing whatever it is he did. We felt great. I waved goodbye and headed back towards the train station.
“Young man!” she called out again. “Yes ma’am?” I replied. She waved a 10 dollar bill at me.
“Please take this for your trouble.”
”But ma’am” I explained, “we helped you because we wanted to.”“But you saved me a lot of time and money, please accept this.”
What a dilemma. In the next few seconds I made a decision that has stayed with me for the rest of my life. To truly help this kind woman, I had to give her the gift of allowing her to show her gratitude. I didn’t need the 10 dollars, but accepting it completed my act of service to her, and allowed her to feel as good as Bob and I. Refusing the reward would be selfish.
“Thank you very much ma’am.” I said, took the 10 dollars, and we went on our way.

#12 - Persistence and Insight

Our brains are wired to solve problems using two mechanisms: persistence and insight. Persistence starts right way by investigating, yelling at and jumping on whatever shows promise. Like an organ grinder and his monkey. Solutions gained through persistence get the job done, keeps the shop running and wins the admiration of one’s peers. It’s a natural competition. Persistence is essential, to either solve the problem directly, or lay the groundwork for an insightful solution later.

But if a problem is hard, then the solutions that emerge from persistence aren’t good enough. That’s when the insight mechanism comes in. Some elements of the problem that you’re studying, plus outside thoughts that you may or may not have known before, will combine in a place away from your thinking mind, to produce an epiphany. One that pops out in a flash and shows the way forward. Evolution rewards those who make inspired leaps, just like good managers and competent leaders.

If you practice having epiphanies with good techniques, then your insights will be regular and sharpened to a keen edge. But if you have little or poor technique, then you’ll be insecure about having them or blindly hope for the best. Catching the insights as they emerge from the unknown part of your mind, and recycling part of them for continuous improvement, is the cutting edge of evolution.

If you don’t know what techniques you use to generate insights, then you don’t have any. Waiting for an epiphany to happen is not a technique. Don’t sabotage your insight mechanism because of insecurity and fear. Fear of getting it wrong, being held responsible and risking public scorn. You can’t predict when an insight will occur, but you can be confidant that one is coming soon.

The epiphany mechanism is a feature of everyone’s brain, but not everyone knows how to use it. It’s a lot like jumping. Learning to jump high is like learning to have better insights. Learning to jump backwards like modern high jumpers, and even pole vaulting, work best. The more unusual and counter-intuitive the jumping technique, the better it works.

#13 - Locked On a Mirage

Our bodies have over 200,000 sensors that present an inconceivable amount of data to our brains every second. It’s up to us to make sense of it all, by building mental models that we use for explaining and navigating.

Interpreting subtle clues like a glance, a nod, or a brief delay can make a big difference in how we act and react towards others. We expect reality to conform to our preconceptions, so keeping them sharp is of paramount importance. Exceptions and outliers to our straight line view of things are often discarded, and the greater truths that they presented are tossed away as well.

Sometimes you become convinced that you have interpreted many details into one explanation, but you’re wrong: the reality is far different from what you believe it to be. I call this locking onto a mirage.

For example, you may think that a man is attracted to you because he keeps looking at you, but really it’s because he’s aghast at what a predictable bore you are. Ironically, while thinking he liked you, you talked on and on to him about trivial stuff. Locking onto the mirage supported his perception.

A few centuries ago, a headache was considered potentially deadly, and people went to the barber as soon as they got one. The barber used his unclean tools to cut your scalp to let the headache bleed out. These cuts often became infected and caused death. That’s why people were convinced that headaches were so deadly.

It’s the same way with innovation, beliefs that we never question might be false. Should you make a focus group with people to test your assumptions? Usually, but how do you know that focus groups always tell the truth? Question everything, even your routines of questioning. New and better models often involve understanding that an additional dimension that is present. The knack of learning to see other dimensions is one of the greatest innovation and life skills of them all.

#14 - Expelling Evil

Once in the carpentry shop, I was assembling a trade show booth for a client, on the day before the event. There was a lot of finished plywood pieces with hardwood edging, oak 3x3’s and numerous metal fasteners.
There was also a nice piece of maple, a 3 foot long 1x10 with beautiful grain. I crouched down to drive in some screws and the maple board was in the way. So I moved it. Next I had to put on some clamps, and it was in the way again. I knew then what had happened, that plank had become evil.
Once you have learned such a truth, don’t take any more chances, just get whatever it is away from the action.
It’s a temporary condition that’s more common than you might think. This time it was the maple, but at any other time, anything might become possessed, gypsy cursed, or even damned by Satan. It really doesn’t matter, all you need to do is move it to the other side of the shop, and be quick about it.
In a little while, the cursed thing will be back to normal. Evil gets bored when it can’t annoy you, and will drift away. But here in this place, at this time, you have to get rid of it, and then announce that evil is being expelled.
This is an essential part of the process. Say it out loud to whoever is there, or even if it’s only you. But it’s never just you, because everything listens. So saying:
”Expelling some evil here” or
”work of the devil“ or even
”Damn you insidious evil.” Are all good.
Once you get rid of the evil, your job will go a lot smoother. It’s a simple thing, no need to over complicate it. When something turns evil, take it away, announce what you did, and get back to work. This is a skill that all innovators would be wise to learn.