-
* What did you do today that was a lot of fun?
* What is something interesting that you learned?
* What happened that made you appreciate your life, work, family or friends?
* What did you encounter that made you curious?
- * What did you experience that filled you with awe?
- * What did you see that was beautiful or inspiring?
- * What new things did you try, or new places did you visit?
- * What fulfilling social interactions did you have?
-
Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control. They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child's control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.
- Try things like a beginner
- * Present yourself as a newbie who is eager to learn
- * Be playful and curious
- * Focus on learning, not how well you can perform
- * See other people as teachers and ask for help.
- * Expect to make mistakes
- * Try to discover what you don't know; reject the idea that you should appear as an expert.
-
As Steve Jobs told Wired magazine, "Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people."
Deja vu is used to describe the sense that you are experiencing something that you have encountered before, even if you haven't.
-
The 30-second Snapshot
A simple way to build your powers of observation is through an activity we call "The 30-second Snapshot." The idea is to imagine that you are a supremely sensitive recording device - a kind of super-Techicolor, holographic camera - that can take in every detail of your environment. Anything that you can see, hear, touch, smell, or taste is recorded.
Spend 30 seconds recording every aspect of your setting. Scan up, down, close to you, and far away. Listen for the sounds, feel what you are touching, and breathe in the smells. Don't let anything escape your snapshot. For thirty seconds, let nothing distract you from sensing everything around you.
If you do this practice a few times a day, it will open your mind, help you to pay more attention to your world, and enhance your sensitivity to your momentary experience. It will also encourage you to be curious and notice whatever is intriguing, surprising, or touched with meaning.
-
Keep an Observations and Quesions Log
A great way to develop your inquisitiveness is to keep an observations and questions log in your journal. Each day, set out to find something that catches your attention or piques your curiosity, observe it closely, and then write a little bit about it. As part of this practice, you can create and collective provocative questions and ideas. Many well-recognized innovators are renowned for keeping such logs. Thomas Edison set regular idea quotas and kept over 3,500 notebooks of his ideas. Similarly, Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group of 400 companies, keeps notebooks filled with questions and observations.
|
|