I read this interesting post by Robert Twigger in which he talks about how he is trying to watch the NEWS with his own filter – a filter for creativity. He also shares a bit about the results. You can read his post here.
This is interesting in many different ways. What he has done is make that which is hidden, obvious. Each one of us looks at the information that comes to us with a filter on. I say this on many occasions and also in my book Thrive, that the human brain is a large pattern recognition engine.
What I hint at, but did not elaborate is the fact that our cognition is only based on a fraction of information that our senses collect every single moment. It is like having a stop motion photography or a having a giant filter that filters everything but what we deem as important or urgent to go through.
And we have the ability to define what needs to be filtered out and what needs to be allowed to pass through. We do this by making decisions and attaching emotions to these decisions.
Here is a simple example. Let’s assume that we are in the market to buy a car and one of the cars we have shortlisted is a buy a black Toyota car. Suddenly, everywhere we go, we start seeing a black Toyota car. Is it that as soon as we shortlisted this car, that there are more cars in the street?
Of course not. They were always there. We just did not notice them (filtered out) as they were not important. As soon as we shortlisted it as a potential car to buy, we invested our emotions and made a choice. And suddenly, this became important and so starts showing up everywhere we look.
We can do a similar exercise with different kinds of filters. Let’s assume that we want to improve our ability to connect disparate things to come up with creative ideas. Once we decide this, you will start seeing connections where we didn’t see connections earlier.
The trick is to add emotions to the choice. The stronger the emotional connect, the better we start seeing this effect. I have used this many times in my work – to think of models that would explain how things operate, to come up with ideas for blog posts, to come up with potential ways to solve challenges that I face at work or in personal lives.
What we are doing here is to take a naturally occurring phenomenon and use it for our benefit. We are taking things that are automatic and making them deliberate. This intention creates attention, which then allows us to make connections. I would recommend that you try this out and think about how best to use this to further your goals.
