I have watched some videos about personal success and read lots of books in this topic.
so i will write here just some notes to keep in mind during your life to keep you on track to help you achieving what you want , Hope its helpful 🙂
Innovation for life
My message today is mainly about nurturing or building or reinforcing your creative potential, your creativity, your capacities for innovation so that they can stand the test of time. I think both the good news and the bad news on this young at heart thing comes from Pablo Picasso who said a long time ago, he said, “Every child is an artist ” I think what Picasso was talking about is that as you get older and as responsibilities start piling on to you, the next thing you know it will almost seem as if circumstances are conspiring against you. There are forces like erosion and entropy that try to chip away at your creative energy. But if you’re willing to work at it a little bit, you can reinforce your abilities. You can prevent that from happening or you can at least fight against those forces as a way to stay young at heart.
“I think someone or something has told you it’s not OK to be an artist.” If you don’t remember anything else I say its OK but I want you to remember it’s OK to be an artist. And so this is part of my message today; it’s OK to be an artist. It’s OK to be an innovator. It’s OK to be a design thinker even if it causes people around you to raise their eyebrows.
This idea about innovator for life is all about starting good habits , you can start now mental or behavioral habits that will help you to be an innovator for life its really about forming habits now that will help you later on, these are 5 habits there is a lot more but we will start with those , and if you think you could come up with a lot more.
1- Think like traveler
Ever notice when you go to a distant city, especially when you travel internationally, ever notice that there’s a piece of your brain that is turned up on high. You’re in this hyper aware state where you notice everything.
All I’m saying is whatever part of that brain is that is super active when you’re traveling internationally, try to turn up that part of your brain all the time. Because if you can do that, if you can have a higher state of awareness that people around you have, you will spot more opportunities and those opportunities will have value for it. So if you can observe more, if you can learn more, if you can get a better or more up-to-date view of human behavior, that gives you power. That gives you credibility as an innovator.
you’ve got to remember you are the world, undisputed expert of your own experience. So try to capture the lessons from your experiences.
“The real act of discovery consist not in finding new lands,” that’s traveling, “but in seeing with new eyes.” Which is thinking like a traveler.
And so that’s this message about think like a traveler, be an anthropologist. Use your powers of observation. Have that part of your brain turned up as high as you can all along.
2- Treat life as an experiment
This is partly about risk. This is partly about actually being willing to fail because experiments, they’re not all successes; that’s why they call them experiments. And so if you treat life like an experiment, you got to be prepared for some stuff not to work out.
if mom raised you that once you start something you got to finish it, then a 300-page book, there’s some big risk in cracking it open. Whereas if you treat that as an experiment and say, “Look, I’m just going to read the first 10 pages and see how I feel. And if that’s good I’m going to continue,” then a book is not so scary. Then the next thing you know you read 10, 20 and 30. And if it’s a good book you get all the way through it. But what got you into in the first place is you were willing to treat it as an experiment. Because if you go whole hog, if you’ve got to do the whole thing that scares people away. And so you can go through your whole life with this method. It’s like, “Look, I’m going to try this. I can put up with anything for a day. I’m going to see how this works.” And so you get in the habit of you’re failing but ideally you’re failing forward. You’re failing in a way that has a little bit of learning attached to each one.
“I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that do not work.” said Thomas Edison .
He had lots of failures. He was willing to tolerate lots of failures and it worked out pretty well for him in the end.
3- Cultivating an Attitude of Wisdom
this idea of an attitude of wisdom which is a healthy balance between confidence in what you know and distrusting what you know just enough that keeps you thirsty for more knowledge. Because we’ve all met people in our lives who they get to be an expert, they develop this deep expertise and they want to rest on their laurels. “I know a lot about that. I don’t need to know more.” I bet you’ve encountered some people like that. And this resting on your laurels, especially with respect to learning – never a good idea.
“It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know for sure that ain’t so.” And this “know for sure” stuff could be really a problem for lots of people.
4- Tortoise Mind
Use this thing that Guy Claxton calls your “tortoise mind”. There’s this great book, it’s called “Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind” and he says the hare brain is the one that you know really well. Hare brain, that’s the brain you can focus, you can concentrate with, it’s under your direct control. But he says there’s this other part of your brain that is not under your direct control, that’s actually smarter than the hare brain. He calls it the “tortoise mind”. And this is where contemplation happens. This is where rumination happens. Your tortoise mind is working on things in the background all the time. And if you work at it, you can actually assign little tasks to the tortoise mind. There are people who are really good at this. They’ll write a question down before they go to sleep in the hopes that their brain will work on it overnight and maybe come up with an answer. So there are ways, if you can address the tortoise mind, you can do things with them.
And so there are researchers now looking into the science of epiphany. People have these flashes of brilliance. Allegedly Newton is under the apple tree, the apple falls, and he suddenly has a fully formed point of view of the idea called gravity. I seriously doubt that it happened exactly that way but there are epiphanies. There are “ah-ha moments” and what’s really happening in that “ah-ha moment”, according to the neurosciences looking into this, is it’s not like you had a lightning bolt come down and deliver all that knowledge to you. It’s that your tortoise mind has been working on this for days, or weeks or months or in some cases, even years and you’ve just crossed the finish line. You’ve just gotten to a place where you say, “Oh, it’s obvious now, isn’t it.” But it wasn’t obvious for the previous how-ever-many number of years. So here’s the thing is, if your mind running like this, like Grand Central Station, it is a big distraction to the tortoise mind because the tortoise mind needs a little space. And so what you have to do, and this is sometimes easier said than done, you’ve got to find a way to take some time to daydream.
5- Do What you Love
Look, this is really simple. Do what you love not because you just want to be self interested , Do it because you’ll be better at it.”
And so, pretty obvious do what you love because you’ll be better. You’ll be willing to put in the extra time, the extra mental energy because you love it.
Try to think of what you should do next. Think about these three circles. The first circle is what are you good at?by the time you reach a certain age most people have a sense of what they’re good at.But watch out for this circle because in this circle lives the curse of competence. Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you should do it. If you look around your school or your office, you might discover you’re the fastest person you ever met on the keyboard. Does that mean you should be a data entry operator? Probably not.”
Next I’ll give some examples to deliver some important concepts on a guy we will call him “Jim”.
He said he was really good at math and everybody said to him, “Jim, you should be a math major.” And so he listened to that advice and he got to school and he continued to be good at math but he ran into people living in the second circle. And the second circle is “What are you born to do?” When are you the happiest? When are you in a state of flow ? , and he said he met people who were never happier than when they were solving equations and doing proofs. And he said, “I realized that good as I was at math, this was not my true calling.” And so he thought about those two circles. Then he thought about this third one. Don’t over emphasize this one but you got to think about it.” Which is, “What will people pay you to do?” Because they say do what you love and the money will follow , it’s not literally true. Think about this intersection , Think about where you are, Then there’s this other thing called ‘who’.” which is who are you going to work with? Who’s on the bus with you? Because you can show up for work everyday and you can do stuff you’re good at, you can do stuff you’re born to do. You can do stuff that people pay you to do, but if you’re working with people that you hate or that hate you or they have no respect for you, still not going to be a happy camper.
Jim said, “I was kind of a nerdy kid. When I was a kid I’d get out my magnifying glass and I would watch a bug.” He says, “And I’ll get one of these old style laboratory notebooks and I’d write down my observations. Everyday I’d watch that bug and how does he eat and does he sleep and what’s the bug doing all day.”
so that’s what he would do. he found himself at this point in life,he was working for Hewlett Packard, great company which he openly acknowledges, but he wasn’t happy. And so he got out one of those laboratory notebooks and he wrote on it “A Bug” at the top. And then he wrote “A Bug Called Jim”. And for two years he kept a laboratory notebook on himself. It wasn’t a journal. He wasn’t writing down the occurrences of the day. He wrote down during the day, during each day for two years when did I feel at my best. When was I in a state of flow? When did I feel the happiest because that’s really important. And it took him two years of discovery, this is the tortoise mind again. It took him two years of discovery but he eventually figured out he was happiest when he was teaching and when he was working on systems, things with lots of little complexities and moving parts. And he said, “I figured out I should be teaching about systems.” And so he did and I think he taught about systems at Stanford for awhile as well until he found another calling. But he kept a lab notebook on himself. And so if you’re wondering, if you’re drawing those three circles in your head and you’re wondering, “What am I born to do?” I encourage you to try this lab notebook. It’s an experiment. Can’t hurt.
Mariam Elbarbary 