Be like a child genius
Let’s not rush into things.
I want, by the end of this month, everyone to be really solid and sure of their values.
We’ll take it step by step.
I started by talking about the fact that small children see a life of infinite possibility.
They firmly believe that they could be an astronaut, a brain surgeon, or a prima ballerina.
And they’d be right.
With the right encouragement, education and experience,
pretty much any child could be any one of those things.
Every future door is open – ready to pirouette or spacewalk through.
It’s only as we get older we close those doors for ourselves.
We collect reasons NOT to follow our dreams.
Assuming those doors are locked tight.
Mortgages, children, partners, parents, friends, responsibilities, loans, schools – feel like really compelling reasons not to rock the boat.
We are predisposed to thinking of reasons why not, rather than exploring reasons we could do the thing we want.
Here’s an experiment before we go on:
Don’t read on for a moment.
No spoilers.
Write down as many uses as you can for…. A HAT.
Ready … steady… GO.
How many did you get?
OK so – most people can come up with 15-20 when they are asked this type of question.
Others can come up with a couple of hundred.
People who could come up with the largest numbers are said to be geniuses of DIVERGENT THINKING.
In a study on this (1500 children were asked to come up with uses for a shoe and a paper clip),
a whopping 98% managed to reach the genius category.
They asked the same children when they were 10 years old.
The average genius level fell to 32%
At age 15 – it dropped to 10%
and when they did a massive survey of 200,000 adults… just 2% of them were geniuses of Divergent Thinking.
As our divergent thinking drops, so do our opportunities.
We get less efficient at overcoming obstacles, thinking of new approaches, and problem-solving.
All the answers to our difficult conundrums will safely filed away in our minds.
In a cabinet marked ‘impossible’.
Circumstances plus time, make change seem much less doable
What if there were a way of living the life of your ‘money-no-object vision’, without needing a billionaire handout?
What if your untapped Divergent Thinking was firing on all cylinders like that genius 2% are?
Tomorrow I’m going to show you how.
But for now.
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QUESTION 3:
How many uses can you come up with for a …. PLANT POT
(let me know in the comments)