How to do what you want with your life, the ‘secret of everything’ making good decisions and having valuable ideas

 

 

 

 

 

This is all about you...

 

This book is about you and you alone.

 

It’s especially about you if you are making advertising, marketing, communications or brand decisions or want to change something in your life or start something new.

 

It's about strategy and ideas. There is no strategy unless there is an idea.This is about having good ideas.

 

It’s about a useful  talent that you have. A valuable one. And one that you maybe don’t know you have.

 

Working in advertising I’ve met a lot of people: artists, writers politicians, entrepreneurs photographers and business people and most of the successful ones could put that talent to work for them.

 

For some, it was behind their best decisions and one of the secrets to their success.

 

There’s a weird thing about this: I started asking them about what that ‘thing’ was, and found a lot of these people didn’t really know.

 

As a person who has made a million bad decisions, I was really interested to find out.

 

So I kept asking. Some would speak about following a ‘hunch’, ‘gut feeling’ or ‘intuition’ or that ‘they knew were onto something’, one called it her ‘gift’,an  ex fiancé called it ‘female intuition’, one person, with a sense of drama, called it his ‘secret of everything’ – they all knew it was tied up with instinct, that was obvious. We all know how important instinct is.

 

The mystery, and their talent, was in how they could ‘tune’ into that intuition and that's what this is all about. That ‘secret to everything’ was their own personal set of techniques for tuning in. And they can be different from person to person.

 

I’m going to put into words, as best I can, the different ways I’ve found these people tune into it.

 

For the sake of giving it a name that has some ‘drama’, I’m also going to call it the ‘secret of everything’; I liked that description, it has some weight to it and a little mystery. But on a practical level this is simply a ‘how to’ guide for making good decisions and having valuable insights and ideas.

 

 

 

 

The only real valuable thing is intuition- Albert Einstein

 

 

 

 

About ‘the secret to everything’

 

This is not a new way of thinking or some mysterious secret.

 

It’s actually like the ‘elephant in the room’. It’s there it’s obvious, it’s big, but no one talks too much about it.

 

So, nothing that follows is particularly original, it’s all stuff that people far more successful than myself have said to me, suggested to me, or alluded to. All I’ve done is teased it apart a little, catalogued it and organise it into a ‘users guide’.

 

I say this as I want to be clear that what follows is not mumbo jumbo or new age nonsense. I haven’t just made up a bunch of stuff or pulled some random gibberish from my imagination. Instead I’ve set out to carefully try and articulate observations of other people and their processes.

 

 

 

 

The elephant

 

The ‘secret to everything’ in itself is really simple. It’s actually something I can write out in just a few lines – and I will later.

 

But the strange thing about the ‘secret to everything’ is that it’s something you have to ‘get’ for yourself. You can’t just be told it. In fact if I just told you what it was here and now you’d be pretty disappointed as it sounds like simple common sense.

 

To ‘get it’ requires some sort of context. This context is provided by a short journey through some very simple ideas. Each idea in itself a way of ‘tuning in’ to an intuition.

 

Anyway, I’ve set out to provide this context, and again, this stuff is not mysterious, it’s simply a lot of stuff other really smart people have led me to.

 

On the surface, this context may look like a list of mostly unrelated stuff. You’ll read it and wonder where the hell this is going and what it’s got to do with ‘the secret of everything’.

 

But if you want to get to the secret of everything you’ll just have to go with it for while.

The book really begins now…

 

 

 

That little voice in your head

 

Most of us have heard it from time to time.

 

If you haven’t, stop reading now, put this thing down and go and watch TV this is not a book about you.

 

Still here…ok.

 

That little voice - call it whatever you want -  a ‘hunch’, a ‘gut feeling’ an ‘intuition’ or ‘that little voice in your head’, when it speaks to you, listen. That little voice knows more than you do.

 

The thing about that little voice is that it comes out of nowhere.

 

Somehow, without you knowing it, from somewhere in the mysterious darkness inside your head, something has been going on and your brain has come up with something it wants you to know about – and that little voice or ‘hunch’ or whatever is its way of telling you.

 

There’s a good case to be made that what this little voice has to say is going to be a whole lot better than anything your conscious mind will come up with.

 

Forget about what your conscious rational mind is telling you. Your rational mind likes to be in charge of proceedings and is in the habit of bossing around that little voice in your head. So, try to ignore that rational thing and go with your instinct.

 

People’s instincts are pretty good. Your instincts will be pretty good too – but you probably know that.

 

To get the secret of everything you need to be able to listen to and trust that little voice.

 

The trick is hearing it and there’s ways of tuning into it – and we’ll come to that soon.  As I said, our conscious mind likes to be the centre of attention and is loud, bossy and opinionated so it can tend to drown out what that little voice is telling you.

 

There’s one other thing guaranteed to drown out that little voice: other people.

 

Other people are trouble.

 

 

 

 

Ignore other people. This is all about you

 

If you have a good idea, don’t ask anyone else what they think.

 

Forget about other people, they are strangers and impossible to understand.

 

Also, if you ask other people what they really think, they’re not always going to tell you the truth. At best, you’ll get polite supportive happy talk. So forget other people. They’re not going to be much help and will only confuse things.

 

Here’s why.

 

If you’ve got an idea and a hunch that it’s right, it probably is. Too much input from others means you have a bunch of possibly conflicting opinions to weigh up. From this comes doubt uncertainty and before you know it, that clarity you had is gone.

 

That certainty you had is lost.

 

You need to listen to that little voice in your head. It’s a quiet voice and it’s easily drowned out. That little voice is the one you want to tune into. That hunch or intuition is all that’s important.

 

This is all about you and what you really think.

 

 

 

 

This horse walks in to a bar...*

 

The other thing about other people is that there is stuff some of them will never get.

 

They sometimes just don’t get your idea.

 

It’s like telling a joke – you can tell someone a joke and they will laugh – they get the joke.

 

If they don’t get the joke you can explain it to them, they’ll then understand why it’s funny, but they still won’t really get it.

 

The joke is only funny if you get it. An explanation kind of ruins the fun.

 

I work in advertising, communication and marketing and I come across a lot of people who just don’t ‘get’ what advertising people or designers do, or understand why all those small subtle things we slave lovingly over are even the slightest bit important. I can explain why they are important, but that doesn’t mean they get it.

 

It’s frustrating, because the people who need to ‘get it' the most tend to be the ones who understand it the least – and therefore the hardest ones to convince they need it. It’s a conundrum.

 

It’s like this: the people that could most benefit from the service are the ones least able to understand the value of the service and therefore the ones hardest to convince they need the service.

 

Ok, so other people don’t ‘get stuff’, but the thing is there is always stuff that you currently don’t ‘get’ yourself – sometimes it’s jazz, sometimes it’s synchronised swimming, sometimes it’s eating oysters, sometimes it’s why one shade of blue is more ‘right’ than another - it can be anything.

 

Deciding you want to get stuff that you don’t get is a big thing. It’s a creative decision.

 

And that stuff you don’t get is always get-able.

 

Learning to ‘get stuff’ is a distinct advantage.

 

There is an exercise you can do to help you ‘get stuff’ – “The Drill”.

 

Next time you don’t get something, as experiment, try the Drill.

 

To understand the secret of everything you’ll need to be able to do this little experiment – we’ll get to this in a little while.

 

 

*

This horse walks into a bar, sits down, and orders a Cosmopolitan. The bar tender looks at the horse and says 'why the long face'. The joke of course being that horses have long faces.

 

 

 

 

What if your instincts are lousy?

 

Sometimes your instinct will be useless.

 

It won’t tell you much at all.

 

Or what it tells you is feeble and indecisive.

 

You will make stupid decisions.

 

Decisions based on fact, analysis and careful rational consideration will be better.

 

However, you can cogitate all you need, but at some point you have to make that decision and that call always comes down to one thing: what you think is best based on the available evidence.

 

It’s at this point, balanced against the evidence, that little voice should get a hearing.

 

While instinct is not your only tool, it’s the only one we’re concerned with here. There is a lot of literature on heuristics – again, you can Google that if you choose.

 

 

 

 

Other people are weird...

 

Other people are a mystery – who knows what they are thinking and feeling. Who knows why they do what they do.

 

Other people are weird and should be ignored.

 

But other people are really important. Unless you can give them a product or service or something that they really want or like, you’re not going to get anywhere.

 

Market research can help, but people can lie to market researchers too, don’t get me wrong it can be useful stuff, but it has its limitations. Good researches will always confess to biases in methodologies.

 

If you want to know what other people are really thinking, and why they do all that weird stuff they do, the best thing to do is to get to know yourself a little better.

 

You can’t really know anyone else until you know yourself – at least that what philosophy tells you.

 

I’m not going to get all ‘deep and meaningful’, or describe a process for getting to know yourself a little better (there are hundreds of books on that already) or even get into the philosophy of it (that’s what Hinduism and Buddhism is for) , it’s just that we’re all largely the same. Mostly we all respond to the same things in the same way. There are some things that are just ‘naturally resonant’. Irrespective of where you are, what you do, race, religion and all that, we’ve got a lot in common with each other.

 

Understand what you like and respond to and you’ll find that it’s pretty much the same as the stuff a whole bunch of other people like and respond to.

 

And it’s that common ground that holds ‘the secret of everything’.

 

The secret of everything involves understanding that some things are just naturally resonant. And then listening to yourself. As I said, this is all about you.

 

This naturally resonant stuff is important and I’ll get back to that a little later.

 

 

 

 

You can be weird too

 

Sometimes we make bad decisions because we are worried about what others will think.

 

Now, if you consider how weird other people are, it becomes clear that worrying about what they think is a weird thing to do.

 

But we worry about it anyway, it’s just how we’re made.

 

Sometimes fighting against that little voice in your head is another little voice – the negative little voice.

 

The role of this voice seems to be to second guess what other people are thinking or will think.

 

This negative little voice is not your intuition speaking. It’s your enemy. It’s meek, fearful, worried about appearances, superficial and stupid.

 

It’s also very persuasive.

 

We all want to please others and have others think well of us and take us seriously – so we tend to give that little voice more authority than it deserves. A power it is willing to abuse.

 

As a rule of thumb, when you have these negative thoughts, ignore them, ignore all of them.

 

So not only do you have to ignore what other people think, you have to ignore what you think they think.

 

Focus on your instinct, not on that negative voice.

 

It’s tricky, because for some reason people tend to fixate on negatives, but that’s not going to get anyone anywhere.

 

 

 

 

 

What that stupid little negative voice forgets that you know

 

That stupid little negative little voice will worry itself about nearly anything.

 

Sometimes it’s worried about what that venture capitalist will think of your ‘out there’ idea or that million dollar client will think of your ‘left field’ business name or brand.

 

It worries what the consumer will think of that really ‘creative’ ad, or how your friends will judge you by what’s printed on your business card.

 

It worries about what that special new person in your life will think about your secret passion for steam trains – it’s a crazy paranoid little voice and there’s no telling what it will prevail upon you to do.

 

It tries to get you to stop doing stuff you really feel good about.

 

But that stupid little negative voice forgets something.

 

It forgets what you know. It forgets that you know we are all a lot a like. It forgets that we’ve got a lot in common with each other. It forgets that merchant bankers, venture capital folk, clients, customers and friends are people too.

 

It’s so worried about judgment that it forgets that other people will often think and feel just like us. And that if we like it, or believe it, there’s a good chance they will too.

 

 

 

 

 

There is too much at risk to make safe decisions.

 

Safe decisions seem like sensible ones.

 

It seems rational – if it works for others, why not do the same thing ourselves?

 

So people pretty much tend to go along with the crowd and fit into whatever the dominant paradigm is.

 

And there’s that negative voice to contend with: it’s another reason why we don’t always go out on a limb – we’re scared of looking foolish and of what others will think, so people make what they think are safe decisions.

 

We are failure adverse and we equate looking foolish with failure; the irony is that this can result in failure.

 

It’s why there is so much boring bland woolly minded ‘me too’ mush out there. Everyone is keeping their heads down and playing it safe.

 

You can see it for yourself, take advertising for example; in any given category all the competitors campaigns, propositions and USPs look very similar and all the major players tend to behave in very similar ways.

 

Mostly it’s because a lot of people making what they think are safe decisions – they’re all playing the same game, maybe even listening to that stupid negative little voice.

 

Which means they end up doing pretty much what everyone else is doing.

 

You won’t do anything remarkable that way – and to succeed, especially in the competitive market, place you need to be remarkable.

 

Which means it is simply too risky to play it safe.

 

So as I said before, not only do you have to forget what other people think. You also have to forget about what you think other people will think.

 

As an exercise, next time you reject an ‘out there’ idea or a ‘left field’ suggestion, ask yourself why and see if that leads to a different decision.

So far…

 

So far we’ve looked pretty much at instinct, intuition and that little voice in your head and how to get rid of obstacles to it being heard

 

Now we’ll look at other ways to put that little voice to work. Ways to ‘tune it in’ and to find inspiration and new perspective.

 

 

 

 

The two thresholds, sensation and cognition.

 

Imagine you are at a cafe.

 

You’re sitting there with the paper, having a coffee, it’s a lovely day, the birds are singing, the cafe is nice.

 

After a while your mood has changed.

 

You probably won’t even realise that your mood has changed – you mostly only notice these subtle things if you make the conscious decision to reflect upon the moment.

 

But if you do reflect upon it you may find yourself feeling ok, you’re content – something about the experience and the cafe has subconsciously affected you.

 

And here’s the observation:

 

Things can affect your mood, state of mind, humour or disposition quite profoundly without you realising it.

 

The things that affected you were within the threshold of sensation, but below the threshold of cognition.

 

The threshold of sensation is when your body and your subconscious is capable of picking and responding to a stimulus.

 

The threshold of cognition is when you consciously reflect on your state of mind and realise it’s changed and maybe even understand why.

 

A lot of the stimulus we encounter in our experience of the world is like this – it affects the way we feel without us realising it – unless we reflect upon our state of mind. It’s stimulus that falls below our threshold of cognition.

 

It’s not new idea or a complex one, it’s a notion that’s been alive in contemporary psychology and philosophy for ages, but to get the secret of everything it requires getting your head around it.

 

The key idea here is that there is a big fat gap between the threshold of sensation and the threshold of cognition.

 

 

 

 

Closing the gap...

 

The secret of everything requires that you master the ability close this gap between the threshold of sensation and the threshold of cognition and do it at will.

 

This is really important. And you might do this already.

 

Here’s what I mean:

 

I like wine, but I know nothing about it. I have  a sip and I like it or I don’t – don’t ask me why I either like it or don’t, I simply can’t tell you. But my friend Crispin can.

 

My friend Crispin likes wine. He can take a mouthful of it and describe it in detail, stuff like “there’s lots of oak, but I’m getting raspberry and some floral notes”. That kind of thing.

 

He’s not being pretentious, he’s not that kind of guy, he’s simply learnt a bit about wine and can tell you what he tastes, what he likes and why.

 

Unlike me, Crispin has learnt to close that gap between the sensation (I like this) and the cognition (this is why I like this).

 

And he’s learnt it by experience and practice; it’s the only way you can do it.

 

The other really important thing Crispin has, that I don’t, is a vocabulary – a bunch of words which he can use to articulate and communicate and think about his experience ‘wood’ ‘floral', ‘oak’.

 

Lots of things we do in the course of our daily lives require the ability close this gap, wine tasting is just one example, there are plenty – chefs, mechanics, surfers, florists, soldiers and heaps of other people all need to train themselves to think and talk about the sensory experiences they have in the course of their professional activities

 

This is what good designers, art directors, photographers and creative people do – some of their best decisions are informed by this.

 

I asked a friend to choose the blue I’ve used on this page, I then asked him to describe that blue it in 5 words.

 

Now, it’s your turn: as an exercise, think about this blue and how it makes you feel. Then try to pick 5 words to describe it. When you have chosen your 5 words, read the small print at the bottom.*

 

A designer will tell you about blue. It’s what they do. They need to think about such things - ask them if they are ‘closing the gap between the threshold of sensation and the threshold of cognition’ or ‘tuning in’ their intuition and they’ll look at you like you were demented: they do it, but don’t know they are doing it.

 

Like Crispin with wine, there may be some areas where you do this too, it's worth considereing what they are, because if you can do it for one thing, you can do it for anything.

 

(*My designer chose the words: calm, optimistic, peaceful, tranquil, and positive. Yes, there’s a book about this too, it’s called Colour Image Scale.)

 

 

 

 

Getting it.

 

A while back in ‘This horse walks in to a bar...’ we talked about how some people don’t get stuff and how we sometimes don’t get stuff ourselves.

 

Central to the secret of everything is being able to teach yourself to get stuff.

 

If you consider ‘The two thresholds, sensation and cognition.’  And ‘closing the gap’ You’ll find that it prescribes a little technique for ‘getting stuff’.

 

When you think this way you can use it to start to get stuff that you may have never gotten before.

 

And this is useful.

 

It means you can look at a thing, an advertisement a place or a product, anything really, and figure out what may make it work and why people may like it and from that you can draw some conclusions, learn something interesting and valuable or find some useful inspiration or direction.

 

This is another part to the secret to everything.

 

It’s something not many people know, so knowing it and being able to do it can be quite an advantage.

 

It’s also something you can practice to become very good at.

 

 

 

 

 

Experiment... The Drill™

 

Take a sick day or a ’mental health day’ and spend it doing all the stuff you like doing.

 

Listen to your favourite music, Google stuff, update your Facebook status, go to your favourite cafe, flirt with the waiter or waitress go shopping, read the paper, watch TV, have a nice nap.

 

Listen to your favourite music.

 

Take yourself shopping.

 

Here’s the experiment:  in the course of making yourself happy you’re going to do one thing. You’re going to keep reminding yourself to think and reflect on your current state of mind

 

You’re then going articulate what you think. Start deconstructing stuff – like the cafe, what do you like about it, what makes it nice? Is it the music? is it the waitress? Is it the ambiance?

 

If it’s the ambiance, what about the ambiance do you like? Is it the colour of the walls? If it’s the colour of the walls ask yourself what is about that colour that you like. Is it a peaceful colour? Is a homey colour?

 

You get the picture. Keep drilling down into the details. Down and down, deeper and deeper.

 

It’s not enough to say ‘I like it because it’s blue’ you need to know what you like about that particular blue, is it calm, optimistic, peaceful, tranquil or positive – you have to keep drilling down as far as you can.

 

Figure out what it is you are really responding to.

 

Often it’s not one particular thing that makes something work. Sometimes it’s a combination of many small things that make the big picture so pleasing.

 

So, reflect; articulate.

 

The secret of everything is wrapped up in all  of this

 

It can be found in the nuances of things, subtle things that we don’t usually notice because they are simply a very small part of larger picture.

 

Things that are so small that you’d not immediately think of them to be in anyway important.

 

What we’re looking for can be found one step beyond where we usually stop – it’s why we have to keep drilling down.

 

It’s why this technique is called ‘The drill’.

 

Sometimes you may drill down to something that feels like an important insight. Sometimes it may be a very, very small thing. But when you find it, your instinct will tell you and it will be right.

 

It’s like wine tasting. You make a decision to try and interpret the sensory input in a conscious way and then try to put a vocabulary around what you find.

You can be good a fooling yourself

 

There’s an idea that many behavioural psychologist hold to be true: a lot of our decision making is irrational.

 

We make most of our decisions emotionally; we then seek to rationally justify our actions retrospectively.

 

We decide lots of things based on emotion – fear (that stupid negative voice again) , anxiety, greed, status, or whatever - and then come up with a bunch of what sounds like rational reasons to justify whatever nutty thing we’ve set our hearts on.

 

It’s why people bought Jaguar cars when for years they did nothing but leak oil and rack up repair bills.

 

Consider that this may be true; consider that we do make a lot of our decisions irrationally. What would this mean for the decisions we consider that we have rationally come to?

 

Would it indicate that another, completely distinct,  decision making process could be considered?

 

 

 

 

There is no right and there is no wrong

 

This is all about you – so when it comes down to hunches or intuition, there is no wrong, only what you think.

 

 

 

 

Thinking ruins stuff...

 

This is going to sound like a contradiction. It’s the opposite of what we’ve spoken about.

 

Sometimes, the more you think about something the more confusing it becomes. Certainty goes out the window.

 

Sometimes the beauty of something is just ‘there’ and pulling it apart into a bunch of discreet details really ruins it.

 

We know that the whole is always much more than the sum of the parts.

 

So this is where the other stuff comes in, the stuff about listening to that little voice in your head.

 

The Drill is just an exercise. You can’t live your life this way.

 

Don’t spend too much time pulling things apart.

 

Only do it when you want to take a break from the way you usually experience or look at the world and think some new perspective may be useful.

 

Only do it when it’s necessary and when your gut instinct isn’t telling you much.

 

Don’t over think things. Listening to yourself (as you over think things) is just as bad as listening to other people or that little negative voice.

 

 

 

 

Snap

 

You’ve probably had times when the answer or the right thing to do has come to you almost instantly and it feels right*.

 

It’s the first thing that has popped into your head.

 

You’ve then battled on with you thinking, maybe for days, only to find that you come back around to your first idea anyway.

 

If your instinct tells you that your first idea is correct go with it. Still explore, but don’t dismiss what seems to come easily.

 

Sure, there are times when that can be stupid thing to do.

 

Sometimes it's true that the first idea that pops into your head is the first idea that’s going to pop into someone else’s too. So if you're after something new you should keep drilling.

 

Another idea will come, they always do.

 

If it doesn’t, go out and walk the dog, take a swim, hang out with some friends or something, then come back to it.

 

When that new and better idea comes along you will have a gut instinct about it too.

 

*I was not going to credit all the people, books and things I’ve drawn on here otherwise it would end up being longer than this book, however I keep getting reminded that there’s a book called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell about this. So some of this will feel familiar to you if you’ve read it. Blink relates this ‘instant’ decision making to experience and expertise in a subject.

 

 

 

 

Too much information

 

Sometimes the more you know the less you can make good decisions.

 

You have to decide how much is enough. The more information you have, the more shades of grey there are.

 

It can become confusing.

 

You need to make judgments: make decisions based on as little information as you need, no more, no less.

 

Too much experience of something can also make decision making difficult.

 

That negative little voice will only tell you that it’s too hard or it’s not possible. You will only see the obstacles, why something is not possible, and that will stop you perusing what you need.

 

If what you’re doing or contemplating is new to you , you will have an advantage. Often People who come from outside don’t have baggage and will often bring ideas that are not blinkered by what they think they know. More becomes possible.

 

It’s hard to step away from your experience. It’s hard to step away from what you think you know.

 

But you can.

 

It’s why children and really, really old people can be brilliant.

 

Children don’t care as much about what other people think, they’re very much focussed on themselves, also their experience is limited, so they don’t see the problems – to them anything is possible.

 

Old people, usually over 70, often care considerably less than they used to about what others think. When you’re 70 time is too short to be wasted on what other people think.

 

If you really want some advice, you can talk to kids or old people.

Trust 'flashes' of inspiration

 

Chances are that your brain is a whole lot faster than you give it credit for.

 

After all we know some ideas happen instantly. They just seem to emerge fully formed from somewhere inside you.

 

Why is a mystery; however consider a theory:

 

Our bodies can only do things so fast, for example it takes time for a nerve impulse to reach a fingertip from your brain. The speed with which we can do anything is limited by bio mechanics.

 

Our brain is another thing all together, inside our heads, without the limitations of things like the speed of transmission down a long nerve fibre, things can happen faster.

 

Maybe it’s why in a dream hours of 'dream time' can occur in only a few minutes of REM.

 

While awake it seems like our conscious brains may be slowed down to better match the speed of the rest of our body. It would after all not be much use if our brains were sending out signals so much faster than our bodies could act upon them. Our conscious perception of time may be an artefact of this.

 

However sometimes, in some situations, like when super quick thinking is a life or death matter, our brains will briefly cooperate.

 

If you've ever been in an accident you may have had the sensation of time passing slowly – it may be a related phenomenon.

 

There is a reason for this discussion: when you've had those flashes of inspiration, they may be better informed than you think and possible worthy of your serious consideration – if you don’t already, trust your flashes of inspiration.

 

 

 

 

If you make up your mind quickly, change it slowly

 

If you have acted quickly on a hunch, it can be tempting to change your mind.

 

You’ll mull things over, consider your options, worry you’ve made the wrong choice, panic, start asking people, start listening to the people you’ve asked and before you know it you’re full of doubt anxiety and things like that.

 

That stupid negative little voice seizes upon the opportunity.

 

So you quickly change your mind back.

 

It happens a lot.

 

So at a point, you’ll have to decide to stop thinking about it and commit.

 

If you think too much, you often end up doing more thinking than doing.

 

So work to a rule: If you make up your mind quickly, change it slowly.

 

 

 

 

What your brain may be telling you

 

So let’s say you have had a flash of inspiration, or something just goes ‘snap’ straight away, or you have a hunch or an intuition or whatever.

 

Your brain is clearly telling you something makes sense, something resonates with it, and the decision feels right.

 

The question is why.

 

Which brings us to the next part of the book.

Naturally resonant ideas™

 

At the beginning there were a couple of lines that went like this: “we’re all largely the same, mostly we all respond to the same things in the same way. Irrespective of where you are, what you do, race, religion and all that, we’ve got a lot in common with each other.”

 

For examples, it’s probably best to look at the 'feel good' stories that you see at the end of the news or on current affairs programs or in the paper or in reality TV.

 

For now, lets consider one of these, reality TV.

 

We all know those stories from reality TV where the underdog triumphs and comes back from adversity to win. The unlikely underdog who struggles, gets knocked down and gets back up again to claim the prize.

 

We see stories like this all the time. And it’s the same all over the world.

 

Our brain seems to like these things, it’s drawn to them, somehow, for some reason, they resonate with you.

 

Take the Drill to these stories and you’ll find something interesting; you’ll find that a range of very similar patterns and very similar stories keep emerging.

 

These stories seem to have a natural resonance –something about them seems to connect with people everywhere, irrespective of race, religion, country and even of time.

 

I call these ‘naturally resonant ideas’, this is just one example of these ideas.

 

I’m not going to concern us with why they are naturally resonant – Google the subject and you’ll find lots of academic research on archetypes and such things.

 

What is true is that such things exist.

 

You can look to literature and the arts if you want and you’ll also find a lot of common themes, there are many instances of broadly similar ideas and personality types populating works of literature, art, cinema, folklore and legend.

 

They do because they are  naturally resonant .

 

They exist in more that just the arts and on TV

 

If you apply the Drill to products, services, TV commercials advertising campaigns you’ll find something similar.

 

There are ways of doing things, expressing things, constructing things, designing things and communicating things that are also naturally resonant.

 

They are naturally resonant; people like them. Identify them, know what to look for and you can look at a thing, an ad, a place, or a product, anything really, and using the Drill, figure out what makes it work - why people like it. Find it and you have identified something that is naturally resonant - and from that you can draw some conclusions, learn something interesting and valuable or find some useful inspiration that you can apply to your own challenge.

 

Understanding and accepting the idea of naturally resonant ideas is another secret to everything.

 

Find what is naturally resonant, when something you discover is right, your instinct will tell you.

 

 

 

The secret language of things

 

What naturally resonant ideas tells us is that there is a secret language of things that we all speak.

 

The shapes textures, colours and sounds of things – and how they all work together, is a universal language.

They tell you things. But they whisper them quietly to you so they can become very hard hear amid all the noise and clutter inside our heads.

 

Trusting your instinct - tuning into your instinct - is how we hear, read and speak that language.

 

This secret language is in everything we can experience with our senses.

 

Tuning into your instincts is not just a tool for gaining valuable business or communications insights. It’s also a valid way of interpreting everything from the visual arts to dance, architecture from product design to the design of expereinces.

 

Again, this is not a new idea. There are books on understanding art or decoding architecture, such as de Botton's Architecture of Happiness. This secret language is universal, consider that what you find in the arts and what you choose to take from them can perhaps provide lessons or insights that can  applied to your business or project or product or service.

 

This secret language, that we all speak, is in those naturally resonant things. Tuning into your instincts to understand that language is arguably the most powerful tool for innovation that you can apply.

 

 

 

Creative

 

Ok, back to Naturally Resonant Ideas.

 

You are creative. You are more creative than you think. We are made this way. It is human nature.

 

I’ve had entrepreneurs, accountants, business people and lawyers assert to me that they were not.

 

A lawyer delivering her closing statements knows how to find a language, a ‘voice’ and a rhythm to her address that sets the tone she wants to create. A buiness person can do the same thing delivering a sales presentation.

 

Look to any professional, look at your own work, and you’ll see there are times when creativity is clear.

 

We all make creative decisions, sometimes as part of our professional responsibilities, sometimes in the course of our every day social interactions. We simply don;t recognise that these are creative decisions. But they are.

 

A host at a dinner party will set a table, light a room and find the music that sets the mood he wants to create.

 

Interestingly, when your host sets out to create the mood, he knows what he is doing. And sure enough if you are there, and you reflect on your state of mind, you may find yourself the mood he has deliberately set out to create .

 

Those things he did, maybe dropping the lights, putting on Karma Police by Radio Head or whatever, sets a tone – that works on you.

 

Instinctively your host knows what would work to set that tone– because it was naturally resonant (even if he didn’t quite think of it that way) - if it works for him, it probably works for you.

 

He understands that certain things have an affected on him, so they may affect you too.

 

It’s communication based on the secret language of naturally resonant things.

 

Radio Head will make you feel the way Radio Head makes people feel around the world – Radio Head makes everyone feel that way.

 

The roll of the Drill is to better understand what is naturally resonant and why creative decisions based on them work. The Drill helps you ‘read’ that secret language so you can better use what you discover to achieve your own objectives and create your own communications – or brand or product or story or anything else.

 

You are creative.

 

We all understand the secret language and naturally resonant things. We have an instinct for them and we all use them, without even knowing we do.

 

And now we have some words, like Crispin with the wine, to articulate the concept – ‘Naturally Resonant Ideas’.

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile in Amsterdam

 

Karma Police was also a Dutch top 40 hit – even if the words were not understood in the Netherlands the way the song made the Dutch feel was probably much the same as everyone else.

Here is the secret to everything.

 

I have printed this really small for a reason, I wanted it to look like fine print so that if you  scanned the book before reading it you would be less inclined to read this.

 

It’s just as I said at the beginning, you can’t just arrive here, you have to get here and hopefully why will now make sense – anyway, my apologies for the contrivance of the small type.

 

Ok…you have experience, you may do research, you get to understand things, talk to people, seek out other views. This is how we rationally inform decision making.

 

Your rational mind then cogitates on them and with luck you have a decision.

 

However the rational approach, even when supplemented by more lateral considerations, may not always produce the best outcome. Things like that little negative voice, too much information, concerns about what other people think, too much conflicting input from others and all the other things we’ve touched lightly upon – they can all bias the outcome of your ‘rational’ process or render it somewhat less than rational.

 

Trusting a hunch is about bypassing all of that. It’s about taking a punt and trusting in your instinct.

 

And that’s the secret to everything – it really is that simple.

 

It’s about by-passing all the stuff that contaminates the rational decision making process. It’s about informing the rational with something more lateral.

 

It’s about creating an alternative decision to consider. A choice. It’s about eliminating some heuristic bias.

 

So this is it. It’s about you and your instincts. It’s about trusting yourself.

 

You will often be right, you are creative.

 

Your instincts will often be good.

 

You just need to believe it.

 

 

END

 

 

 

 

Thanks

 

Thank you to John Pospisil who provided some clear thinking, ideas and the inspiration to do this, without John this would not exist. Even though he didin't put pen to paper for this, this is very much a product of my conversations with John, thank you John. There are also a lot of people to thank. You know who you are. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and ideas with me. I am grateful.

 

 

 

End Notes

 

In the time since I showed a first draft of this to some friends and colleagues, I also Tweeted it and shared it on FaceBook and received a few more ideas. I’ve yet to incorporate these into the book, so I present them as end notes.

 

If you have any thought’s you’d like to contribute to the next draft. Please e-mail me at myintuition@yahoo.com.

 

Thanks for your help.

 

Ravi

 

 

 

Choices

 

If we accept the concept of Naturally Resonant Ideas and that “we’re all largely the same, mostly we all respond to the same things in the same way” we can make a small leap.

 

We could say this: physiologically and intellectually we are also largely the same and capable of the same things.

 

Sure, some of us are smarter, faster, more gifted intellectually or physically, but generally speaking, we are mostly all capable of the same things.

 

Which makes things very interesting for you.

 

It gives you lots more choices than you may have imagined. Because if someone else can do something, chances are that you could to.

 

If someone can fly a Boeing 747, solve a cryptic cross word, start a business, remove an appendix, write a song, learn the bassoon, bake a lemon tart, master Mandarin, you can too.

 

Ok, there are a lot of variables – will power, drive, ambition, luck, resources, application, education and things like that. We all know it’s not a level playing field, and besides, you may not want to remove an appendix.

 

The point is this, if you really, really, really wanted to do something, you probably could. You may not have the virtuosity of Mozart, the wit of Murakami, the style of Nick Cave, you may not be brilliant at it, you may even be terrible, but at least you could still do it if you wanted.

 

It all comes down to an act of will.

 

I’m not going to discuss that act of will, or motivation or anything like that. This is not a self help book or a motivational book. There are millions of those already.

 

Rather this is about that stupid negative little voice.

 

It’s going to spend a lot of time telling you that you can’t do it because you’re not capable of doing it. That’s what it does; it tells you that you are not good enough. That you ‘can’t’.

 

But if we accept that physiologically and intellectually we are largely the same, it’s clear that you can.

 

 

Other people, an exception to the rule

 

You probably have a view on the efficacy of committees.

 

Often committees or collaborations or team work is dysfunctional and useless.

 

But you've probably also had times when collaboration has been effective.

 

If you think about those successes you'll probably find they are distinguished by one thing: you  had custody of your own distinct area of responsibility and the authority to make the final decision in that area.

 

Others may have made a suggestion, or voiced a respectful contrary opinion, but when a decision is to be made it was yours alone.

 

Collaboration means never second guessing your collaborators. If you do, it will not work.

 

It has been said that the secret to management, if you can generalise, is simple: Hire the very best people you can afford, then get out of their way and let them do their job.

 

Collaborations tend to work the same way.

 

 

 

Sleep on it.

 

You have probably woken up and somehow the answer you’ve been looking for is there in your head waiting for you.

 

It's come to you in your sleep.

 

Try doing it deliberately. Go to sleep on an idea. Your brain will do the work of its own accord when your conscious mind is not there to boss it around.

 

Take whatever you are thinking about to bed with you.

 

 

Creative – implicit and explicit

 

Creativity has two primary channels: the explicit – the things what we say, the formal elements to a creative composition or piece of writing, the choice of words, the gestures or the selection of colours. And the implicit, what those choices, deliberate or subconscious, communicate - what they make you feel.

 

They are about the things that resonate.

 

The explicit determines the implicit.

 

 

 

Profound insight should sound like simple common sense.

 

 

 

All material here is copyright © 2009 by Ravi Prasad. For more information please contact Ravi at myintuition@yahoo.com or phone his Australian mobile: 0414 235 325.