Jump Start Your Brain: How Everyone at Every Age Can Be Smarter and More Productive

Act 1

Brain Training

When Doug meets Disney, creativity ne’er wanes; our team explodes when he jump starts our brains!

– Ellen Guidera, Vice President, Walt Disney Company

1

INNOCENCE

"While we may not be able to control all that happens to us,

we can control what happens inside us."

– Ben Franklin

Creativity starts with the willingness to look at the world through innocent eyes . It involves shaking ourselves from our prejudices and established thinking patterns. Copthorne MacDonald, an expert on the cultivation of wisdom ( http://www.cop.com ), explains how innocence helps us discover new insights:

We find ourselves looking at the same old data, but we now see it in a dramatically different way. We experience another valid, and sometimes more significant way of understanding what is.

Sadly, the world grinds away at our trust and our innocence. Experience teaches us to doubt, to scoff and roll our eyes. In no time at all, the world can turn a genuinely creative individual into a Real World Adult. At that point, there’s not much of the real you left—too often, just a job title on a business card, a nameplate on an office door, a number on a badge, a face in the crowd.

Think back. Remember when you were young and the world was a glittering place of limitless possibilities? Everywhere you looked, you found something new and different. Remember the magical feeling that you could do anything simply because nobody was telling you otherwise.

A child’s word is made of spirit and miracles. We sometimes think that children should follow us, listen to us, become like us. Follow a child closely for an hour. Not to teach or to discipline, but to learn, and to laugh.

–SARK, A Creative Companion

Or to put it another way:

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.

–Aldous Huxley

The key word is spirit. The goal is not to remain a child for the rest of your life, but to retain that childlike spirit of wonder and a willingness to innocently believe in possibilities.

As children we have a natural innocence. As we age we lose it. I believe that one of the greatest benefits of spending time with children and grandchildren is that they teach us the virtues of innocence—IF we are aware and open to the learning.

Three Quick Examples of Innocence

EXAMPLE NO. 1: TRUTH IS RELATIVE TO THE CUSTOMER’S VIEWPOINT

One day, I was reading Big Bird’s Color Game to my then three-year-old daughter, Tori. On one page, Big Bird was shown thinking of something orange that’s good to drink. I bet you can’t guess what it is, so said Big Bird in his word balloon.

On the next page, Tori had a choice of a half-dozen orange-colored items—a butterfly, a T-shirt, a jack-o-lantern, a toy boat, a tiger lily and a glass of orange juice.

Which one did you pick? Tori picked the tiger lily because of its long stem, which she took to be a straw. When you’re three years old, good equals fun. And it’s a lot more fun to drink through a straw than from a plain old glass. The tiger lily might not have been the answer Big Bird had in mind, but it was a valid response to the question.

EXAMPLE 2: MORE THAN ONE RIGHT ANSWER

Children have an ability to see alternative answers as their brains have not become mentally constipated with the one right answer. Consider an incident that occurred when my other daughter, Kristyn, was taking one of those pre-screening evaluations for kindergarten. The woman administering the test showed Kristyn a picture like this:

What does it look like to you? Kristyn decided it was a windmill. The nice lady explained that, no, it was an airplane propeller—at which point Kristyn launched a 10-minute counterclaim. She argued that, with all due respect, the picture she had been shown was most definitely and undeniably of a windmill.

Afterwards, the nice lady explained to my wife that, technically, she should have subtracted points from Kristyn’s score for her answer.

But she convinced me, the nice lady said. I guess it is a windmill after all.

EXAMPLE NO. 3: WHO’S THE SMARTEST?

As an early post-toddler, my son, Brad,, was told that his clothes should match. He followed these directions explicitly. As a result, he often wore socks of two different colors. When it would be pointed out to him that his socks didn’t match, Brad would argue they did. And he would be right, inasmuch as each sock would match a part of the rest of his outfit. After dressing himself with, say, a red shirt and a pair of blue pants, he would choose a red sock and a blue sock.

When you think about it, Brad actually might have a better idea. Just because his socks didn’t match each other didn’t mean that, in the larger sense, his whole getup wasn’t color coordinated.

Grow Up but Don’t Grow Down in Creativity

The whole point of growing up is to become a grown-up. It’s too bad, really. What happens to us? In the transition from innocence to experience, why do so many circuits in our brains slam shut?

It’s because, early on, we’re told to stay inside the lines when we color. It’s not a bad thing to learn how to color inside the lines, unless it’s the only way we know how to color. In other words, as our education increases, imagination often decreases. THAT IS IF WE LET IT.

Think about what Marvin Camras of the Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute, the inventor of magnetic recording and holder of more than 500 patents, said in an interview in Inventors at Work, by Kenneth A. Brown, published by Tempus Books of Microsoft Press:

I think little children tend to be creative, but the more education you get, the more the inventive spark is educated out of you. In our educational process, you have to conform. Educators don’t like you to go off the beaten path. In math, for example, you have to follow the style that someone suggests. After you’ve gone through more and more education, you conform more and more. You might even say that you’re discouraged from inventing. Of course, different people have different natures. Some people can invent in spite of their education.

As we march toward Real World Adulthood, we become increasingly categorized, polarized, and depersonalized. We learn to wear uncomfortable uniforms so we can be identified quickly and efficiently. We take the safe road—the one in the middle. We accept conventional wisdom and toe the company line.

We read from the same books, take the same exams, and drink from the same cup of knowledge. This cup has been passed around quite a bit. In the process, we inevitably consume a certain amount of backwash.

Never let formal education get in the way of your learning.

–Mark Twain

This is not to say there’s no value to growing up. We need Real World Adults to beat back the wilderness and keep the wolves away. But we pay a price. To give our lives focus, we put on blinders. We starve our imaginations. We fall out of sync with our inborn ability to see what no one else can.

Recapture the innocence of childhood, and you’ll open the windows in your brain. Once the windows are open, you can’t keep imaginative ideas from entering—or, more important, from coming out.

Great ideas can come from childlike minds, the psyches that are naive and unafraid. The essence of the Eureka! Way is to rekindle that way of thinking, so that you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch as if for the first time.

Recapturing innocence and opening our minds is more than just a means for getting greater pleasure out of life. It’s a method for capturing the spirit of entrepreneurial thinking and enthusiasm that made this country great.

It’s also key to jump-starting your brain.

Consider your last five jobs or significant life roles. List them on a piece of paper like this:

Job 1: ____________________________________________

Job 2: ____________________________________________

Job 3: ____________________________________________

Job 4: ____________________________________________

Job 5: ____________________________________________

Think back to your first 30 days on each. Try to recall the rush of ideas you had, the problems you saw, and the solutions you imagined. If you’re a parent, remember the thoughts you had before your child arrived. Remember how you were determined to be the perfect parent? Remember how you weren’t going to make the same mistakes your parents made?

Chances are, you were a fountain of energy and enthusiasm, a veritable fireworks display of ideas. Why? Because you were new, naïve, and innocent.

Then one of two things happened. You ran with your ideas because you didn’t know any better and you shined … or your ideas flickered and died because you kept your mouth shut. And that was the end of that. Before long, you were educated, as in processed.

Where are those thoughts now? Whatever became of them? What do you wish you’d done with them?

You just open yourself up to become like a child. All of a sudden, the world is a wide-eyed experience again. You start feeling again, and you see the world through the eyes of a five-year-old. Once you get rid of preconceived notions, ideas can start to cross-pollinate.

–Eric Schulz, Buena Vista Home Video, the Walt Disney Company

Once, when my eldest, Kristyn, was small, she decided she would grow up to be an artist. The day before that, she was going to be a nurse. The day before that, she was going to be a ninja. Today she’s studying engineering at Smith College and still dreaming. Last fall she wanted to solve the world’s environmental challenges. This summer she wants to be a patent lawyer helping independent inventors.

To her, everything was possible—and happily, still is. It may not be the most practical point of view, but it beats being a Real World Adult.

The Power of Simple Things

Step outside yourself. Are you the person you wanted to become? If not now, when will you get back on track?

1. One of the great powers a child has is the ability to find joy in small, simple things. As adults, we have a love of complexity. To recapture that wonder of small, simple things, spend a day with a child. If you don’t have a child of your own, borrow one: a child between the ages of four and seven, maybe a niece or a nephew, a neighbor’s kids, or your grandchildren. You want a child with no grown-up tendencies whatsoever.

Go for a walk, take a ride, share a Special Day with a child. Special Days are big occasions at my house. On Special Days, the kid is boss. The kid decides what to do and where to go.

Be forewarned that you run a risk here. You risk floating a paper boat on a pond at the park, building a kite from scratch or maybe heading off to a second-hand thrift store and buying a bunch of dress-up clothes. You run the risk of lying on your back in a grassy meadow and imagining faces and horses galloping in the clouds overhead.

Whatever your child does, you do it, too. Don’t just stand there like a bump on a kosher dill. Ask your child lots of questions. Find out everything you can about your child. Don’t be afraid to ask silly questions. Have some laughs.

2. Read a book to a child. Find a book with no connection with reality, like one by the late Dr. Seuss, arguably one of the great creative minds of our time. His characters and stories will live forever because they aren’t like anything anywhere anyhow.

Grab your coat, run to the library or nearest bookstore and pick up a pile of Dr. Seuss’ greatest works. Here are a few suggestions. Note: these are also ideal books for your personal creativity library.

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