Engage Your Brain

Here’s a tip:

Think about it.

By “think,” I mean, “think.” And by “it,” I mean, “everything.”

Our world has reached a pace where we no longer have time to think—if information is not spoon fed to us in bite sized, pre-digested nuggets, we cannot consume it.

The problem is, we cannot use pre-digested nuggets, because we digest information in two steps, not one, and we need to do both for ourselves for information to become accessible:

First, we have to come to understand the information. And by understand, I mean fully understand it—what the information means at face level, what it means to us, and how we can use it.

Second, we have to achieve an emotional acceptance of the information. You can tell me all day long that sugar is bad for me; I don’t care, I’m still having dessert. Without emotional acceptance, we can “know” things all day long, we’ll never put that information to use.

And here’s the rub: you know how we achieve emotional acceptance of information? By struggling to learn it, that’s how. The process of working to understand something is critical to the second step in digesting it. Short cut the first step, and you can’t do the second.

We’re not birds—we can’t stomach the regurgitated stuff.

I get asked, with some frequency, to take the final step in my blog posts and make that last connection for people—put two and two together. My answer?

No.

There are plenty of blogs where you can go and marvel at how smart the author is and how wonderful the information provided is. I like those blogs. They make me feel smart.

But for my blog, I don’t care as much about making you feel smart as I do about making you actually smart.

So I give you things to chew on.

And take back into your life.

It’s an approach to problem solving you should engage in as much as possible: whatever activity you’re engaged in, assume it’s a metaphor for work and figure out where the connection is. Sometimes, the connection will be obvious, other times, it won’t be. It doesn’t matter.

It’s the process of working through the problem of finding the connection that engages you and helps you understand your business challenges better.

All you need to do is think about it.

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Tagged as: problem solving