December 09, 2009

Put your mind to work while you sleep

Over the last few months, I've been honing my creative strategy. 

After reading David Lynch and Horst Rechelbacher's works, I realized that creativity is something you must cultivate and develop tools for.  I've been using a non-spiritual form of meditation recently: Doing busy work to give my mind time to think/ideate/create.  I take a repetitive but valuable task (filing expenses, booking flights online, etc.) that requires alertness but little creative thought.  This leaves a huge portion of my brain/mind some time to do its thing.  Many of my solutions, breakthroughs or original ideas came to me during these mundane tasks.  You might do it when you shower or garden, I do it during my workaday. 

For John Cleese, sleep time is creative time.  He and I spoke at the Yorkshire Int'l Business Convention this summer in the UK.  Using my trust Panasonic hand cam, I captured a few minutes of his keynote, where he explained this concept - check it out! 

John Cleese On How To Put Your Mind To Work While You Sleep 

Posted at 11:17 AM in Business Effectiveness  |  Permalink  |  Comments (2)  |  TrackBack (0)

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Commentor

"sleep time is creative time", this is a quote that gave me a lot of fun in sleeping, thanks for posting this.

Sam Nisbett

Posted by: cpap  |  March 01, 2010 at 08:16 AM

Commentor

Hi Tim,

That is a great point. The most powerful part of our mind by far is the unconscious. When we ask ourselves questions before we go to sleep, our unconscious mind can solve them for us while we sleep. How awesome is that!

Also, I noticed that when I have a technical problem, I can just forget about it and a few hours later a great solution always comes to me. Sometimes it takes a day. But the interesting thing is that I do not find the solution by sitting around thinking about it. I get to wait hours for my unconscious mind to solve it.

And you make a great point about mundane tasks. Anything that has to do with movement (driving, walking, jogging), using our hands, or water (like a shower or bath) are outstanding tools for tapping our inner creativity and generating new and wonderful ideas.

By the way, Love is the Killer App completely changed my life! It is one of my top 10 favorite books of all time! Yay lovecats!

Posted by: B7  |  December 11, 2009 at 08:52 AM

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