Thinking Differently

25 Ways To Get A New Perspective

Garth Beyer

1) Talk to a homeless person

2) Go into a specialty shop, like the store that still cells cd’s and records, and ask the owner how he got into his business

3) Give someone your number

4) Ask someone from the opposite gender for theirs

5) Make eye contact through an entire conversation

6) Take public transportation

7) Go through the application process for a job you don’t want

8) Travel out of the country or just outside your town

9) Go into a store, ask a clerk what is the bestseller and figure out why

10) Ask a brewery, a farmer, a beekeeper if they could use a hand

11) Do something that you did as a kid, but haven’t in a long time

12) Visit an ethnic restaurant and order the safest thing on the menu and watch how other people eat

13) Take a walk through the nearest arboretum or botanical gardens

14) Fly in a small plane or helicopter, it’s worth the money for a birds eye view

15) Go to the movie theater alone

16) Fast for one full day

17) Make a really crappy craft and give it to someone who has never received a gift

18) Ask a group if you can join them: in frisbee, in bowling or in conversation

19) Watch a documentary this weekend

20) Bake cookies and bring them to your local fire station (ask for a tour if they don’t offer)

21) Read a poem from someone who is dead and someone who is alive

22) Ask a friend of a friend to put music on your ipod (or ask to borrow theirs for a few days)

23) Excessively tip a waiter/waitress and see how they react

24) Purge your living space of everything you haven’t used/touched in the last year

25) Write your own obituary

 

Stay Positive & Go Learn To Think About Things Differently

Risk Being Wrong

Garth Beyer

I would say the most number of blog posts I’ve deleted instead of publishing were ones where I predicted things.

Predict the success of Airbnb? Predict the future of social media? Predict the future of mobile apps, eBooks, drones? Who am I to make those predictions?

Since those mistakes (the deleting, not the predicting), I’ve realized that predictions are meant to make us think about things differently. Very few who predict are right, but those who are made dozens, if not hundreds, of failed predictions before hand.

The most interesting thing is that those who predict, we’re right early. They took the risk.

If I write about how successful Airbnb will be now, well, that simply doesn’t make sense.

Predict. Try. Think about things differently.

After all, rarely does anyone notice when you’re wrong, and if they do, rarely do they care that you’re wrong. All that it takes is to be right once. And when you’re finally right? Who cares. Being right isn’t the point.

 

Stay(ing) Positive & Thinking About Things Differently Is

 

Lazy Brains

Lazy Brains

Garth Beyer

Breakthroughs don’t come from simply staring at an object and thinking harder about it.

A sculptor doesn’t stare at a ball of clay and then magically turn it into something remarkable. No. She collects and combines images throughout her day that, pieced together nicely, can be communicated effectively through clay.

It is the images she collects and combines that make the masterpiece, not the clay itself, and the images in her arsenal come from the variety of her experiences.

We have naturally lazy brains. Some might spin the word “efficient” around, but I believe they’re lazy. Our brains take shortcuts, our peripheral vision isn’t what we are really seeing, it’s what our brain is guessing we would see.

Gregory Berns wrote in his fantastic book Iconoclast, “Experience modifies the connections between neurons such that they become more efficient at processing information.”

That is, the more experience we have the better the processing. Moreover, the more new experiences we have, the more likely we acquire a path of uncharted processing, which leads to creative remarkability.

Therefore the path of an artist is quite simply laid out… have more new experiences and you’re bound to create better art.

 

Stay Positive & New Is Always Better

Advice To My Younger Self

Advice To My Younger Self

Garth Beyer

During meditation earlier my mind began to wonder. For some reason it went back to some childhood memories, of moments that I thought I was the only one who thought something or experienced something.

You know the odd-looking air on the horizon of a road, it’s almost as if it was heat or some fume? When I asked anyone driving in the car with me if they saw it, they responded as if I was crazy. I believed them.

Or, to the extreme, thinking of jumping off a building you’re on. Everyone has thought it at one point, but in the moment we feel so alone, as if we’re the only ones who think these things and we get uncomfortable about it.

The advice I’d give to my younger self is “you’re going to think about a lot of things that you will think are unique to you. They’re not.”

The reason I’d say this to my younger self, and to you, now, is that we have thoughts, which we quickly dispel based on the premise that we think we’re the only ones to think it. It’s a tragedy, really.

You think you’re the only one who has come up with a spectacular idea, but you’re not.

Think Jobs was the only one to think of transportable music in your pocket? Think Gladwell was the only one to wonder about cockpit culture and why planes crash? The answer is yes, you do.

And we’re wrong in that thinking; they’re merely the only ones who acted on an idea. You can be them if you realize you’re not the only one who thinks about things differently, who has the thoughts you do, who has an idea that just might damn well work.

 

Stay Positive & Worth A Try Right?