Hello Friends,
Greetings from Barcelona☀️where I am finding it harder than normal to stay focused. More on that below👇
🙌Many thanks for reading The Quest.
If you are joining for the first time, welcome to our deep dive into all things creativity, facilitation, and learning.
You can catch up on the last edition 💡How to Motivate Students and all past editions here.
💭When is the last time you had an insight?
A time that you found a better way of doing something. A new way of approaching a prickly problem at work. Or a tweak to your routine that now saves you time during your busy day. A mishap in the kitchen that led to a better way to cook.
One of my last insights led to a dramatic improvement in my tennis game.
I noticed that I was starting my matches well. But then after a few games I would crash out. It became a pattern. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong.
Then I was in a session of the Keystone Accelerator, Billy Broas‘ brilliant online course on sales messaging. Billy is a pro at breaking down big abstract marketing concepts into small bite-sized building blocks.
I had an Aha! moment.
In the middle of one of Billy’s sessions, I had a sudden flash of insight about my tennis game. I suddenly realized that I played each point as if it was make or break for the entire match. That was OK for the first few points. But then the pressure (on myself) would become too much and I would crash out.
And then it dawned on me. What if I applied Billy’s same building block approach to my tennis game? Instead of tying each point to winning the entire match, I could simply focus on winning each point. I tried it out and it worked. I now call it my “point-by-point” strategy and it has helped me take a big leap in my tennis.
We rely on insights to make important discoveries.
Some insights can change the world. They help us cure diseases. They spark innovation. They help us solve crimes. They lead to Nobel Prizes.
Insights are more frequent than you may think.
We have insights every day. My tennis example is an example of an everyday insight. The only prize it’s going to win me is the women’s ladder at my local tennis club. I feel more relaxed and I enjoy tennis more. And I have started to apply my “point-by-point” strategy to other parts of my life with positive results.
Where do insights come from and how can you have more of them?
That’s our quest for this week🔎
👉 Insights from the book Seeing What Others Don’t
👉Dan Pink on how to gain insights from a “failure resume”
👉When others see what you don’t
Let’s dive right in!
📘Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights
A book by cognitive psychologist Gary Klein that I came across in Ravishankar Iyer’s excellent newsletter Story Rules.
Through stories and examples, Klein explores 3 key questions about insights
- What are they?
- Where do they come from?
- Can you have more of them?
He writes the book as if he is on a quest, sharing his questions and insights as he goes. It gave me a whole new understanding of insights and breakthroughs, and how facilitators can create the conditions for them to happen with our groups.
Here are 3 takeaways from the book:
👉 Insights shift us toward a new story. They help us challenge our core beliefs. They can shift us to a new set of beliefs that are more accurate, more comprehensive, and more useful.
👉 Insights can’t be taken back. They are irreversible. He quotes Hilary Manel in her book Wolf Hall “You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
👉 Insights become valuable when they are translated into action. You need to connect this new data to a challenge in order to have a breakthrough. Otherwise, they don’t count for much.
Where do your insights come from?
🤦♀️How to Gain Insights from a Failure Resume
A 140-second video by Drive author Dan Pink where he tells you why you need a “failure resume” and the insights you can gain when you write one.
The failure resume was invented by Stanford professor and creativity expert Tina Seelig. The failure resume is a counterpart to our traditional resumé.
A traditional CV focuses on our successes and accomplishments.
The failure resume focuses on our setbacks, screwups, rejections, and disasters. And it can give us important insights on how to do better.
Pink discovered that he had been making the same two mistakes over and over. Pinpointing these mistakes helped him avoid falling into the same pitfalls.
What insights can you gain from your failures?
👀When Others See What You Don’t
Another powerful way of increasing the flow of insights is through getting feedback from others. Feedback can help you uncover your blind spots so you can do things better.
One of the most effective (and sometimes scary) ways to uncover your blindspots is to ask a relevant person:
Is there anything that I may not be aware of that is preventing me from doing better?
I love how Aidan Yeep illustrates the concept of blindspots in his Twitter post👇
📜Motto of the Week
In case you are finding it challenging to focus as we come to the end of the year, here’s a motto from someone who knows a thing or two about focus:
“Precision of thought, economy of words” Dr. Anthony Fauci
💌Thanks for reading The Quest
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Creatively yours,
