Posted by Mike King under Learning | 11 Comments »

Maximize Your Free Time to Create New Wealth & Purpose

Author: Robert Pagliarini

It is a total joy to share books with my readers and especially books that I learn a lot from or that I can really connect with.  The book “The Other 8 Hours” does both of those things for me and so it is my pleasure to tell you how great this book it.  Robert contacted me to offer me a free copy with hope that I would review here at LearnThis.  I was excited by the description and title yet apprehensive when I don’t have it recommended by many people since it is a new book just out.  Long story short, I loved the book and will definitely recommend it as one of my favorites.

The Creative Spirit

The book explores personal development by specifically focusing on what you do with the 8 hours or so every day that you are not working or sleeping.  It focuses you and inspires you to make that time available to become a Cre8tor, a person with a drive to create new opportunities, that generate more wealth and purpose and happiness in your life.  The book has 4 main sections in it:

• Get a Clue
• Get More Time
• Get More Money
• Get a Life

All of these sections have chapters to explore each statement and there is actually quite a lot of depth to each topic.  Pagliarini covers everything from examining the life leeches that exist around us taking away from the available time that COULD be ours to a fantastic set of resources with each chapter that can kick start any Crea8tor channel you want to pursue.  There are strong messages in each of these four areas and I’m fortunately enough to have experienced many of these in my own life so have explored and even executed many of the challenges put forward.  I certainly have not however, collected such a strong, consistent and enjoyable text to read from all these lessons and clearly Pagliarini has down much in his own life to experience these as well AND he has done an immense amount of research to back things up with statistics.

Another aspect that is unique in this book that I really enjoyed are there being many 1 page short stories and examples of people who have taken these techniques and put them into action, each showing the major benefits to be had as a result.  I found the stories to be quite enjoyable clips to read and put much of what is written into real life context that is easy to relate with.

Get More Time

The tips on getting more time are absolutely timeless and powerful.  There is so much in here that I agree with as a productivity lover it was simply fun to read, yet there was also much to learn from even with the countless hours I’ve put into this area already myself. One example of this is termed “boosting” and used to describe taking on a second job or side job that is so mindless or easy that you can use it to actually study or work on other things while getting paid.  It gives two benefits, some extra income to use for creative channels or to catch up on debts as well as to further yourself in new knowledge areas, business plans or others such needed Cre8tor work that is difficult to make time for.  While I don’t plan on taking on any second mindless jobs myself, I will certainly use and share this concept again, some people come to mind to me for this right now.

He includes what I can easily say is the best 18 pages I’ve ever read on the powers that grip us in life and suck our time away from us.  Everything from TV watching or being disorganized to doing more than is necessary.  There are 24 items lists in this section with the typical common behavior and then a short straightforward solution that anyone can use to tackle that problem.  If you take nothing else out of this book, take this, as you will find yourself creating more time and increase your productivity, which obviously I’m a big fan of doing!

Get More Money

This section of the book is brilliant and clearly the main content as it covers in superb clarity 10 separate suggested channels or areas to follow as a cre8tor that can bring in new wealth and opportunities to make a better life for yourself.  The examples of course continue throughout and each of these channels are outlined with many ideas on what they might look like, how you can start, a typically process map for executing it and then a great set of resources to get started in each one.  This is absolutely packed with great content and again, easily makes the book worth buying just for these chapters alone.

Get More Life

Finally after touching on all the great aspects and opportunities, Pagliarini covers what many critics want to see.  What makes all this difficult is life.  Life gets in the way and needs to be managed better to even dare take on few work in our other 8 hours.  This section helps here and has many compressed lessons on productivity, habits, goal setting and other great techniques to manage all this and actually get it all done.

Conclusions

There are a few sections scattered through the book that talk about purpose and legacy and what you can do that is bigger than yourself but I must say this was the only thing I was a bit disapointed in.  Everything I thought was quite finance centric and the overall read of the book to me was about making more money.  That is an overall message though, not the only one.  So much is covered this is likely just a personal feeling.  I am really quite impressed by this book and am certainly going to check out more from Pagliarini as certainly has a best seller here if I had to make any guesses.  It’s a fantastic book that I encourage anyone to read.  It truly applies to to anyone with even the slightest desire to get a little more out of life or to change your current circumstances.  I still have many references and websites to check out from several chapters that will keep be coming back to it for the next little while.  I know each of you will enjoy it as well.

Note: I always avoid reading other’s reviews once I start a book as I know that lets me write the most objective review I can.  I’m happy to see that after writing this, I just checked out the reviews for it on amazon is its getting 5 stars across the board as well.  So, go check that out the reviews if you need to see more or to buy the book.  Also, check out the book website at TheOther8Hours.com.

Posted by Mike King under Book Reviews | 4 Comments »

There are 3 main areas of the brainstorming process.  They are to generate new wild ideas, to build/expand on existing ideas and to capture all thoughts around the brainstormed topic.  I last wrote that doing this has 6 steps to setup an effective brainstorming session and then a number of rules to follow or use for the session itself.  That is what I will explore here:

1. Defer Judgment

This is the one thing that will or break a brainstorming session.  It’s so hard to do and absolutely must be a rule you follow to keep ideas flowing and to allow people to contribute in their way without a filter applied or any kind of judgment on their ideas.  You shouldn’t moderate anything in brainstorming and really anything goes.  All ideas.  Weird, difficult, unrealistic, and any other ideas must be allowed.  These in fact allow people to be comfortable with the creative process and you want to promote and encourage ideas, not instill a fear of blurting out a dumb idea.  There is no reason to have any criticism in a brainstorming session and if you see that or moderation of ideas at any time, put an end to that and reinforce that you welcome weird and even what seems like bad ideas.

2. Everyone Participates

Make sure that everyone has a chance to participate and to be heard.  The facilitator should ask each person for their ideas and to expand on things.  Take note of the group, some people will start to lead and share more which is great but you don’t want any one person to dominate the session or you lose the value of the diversity in the group.  If the environment and tools tailor to audible, visual and kinesthetic people (as I outlined in the first article) then you should be able to easily have everyone participate.  You just need to make sure that is happening in the session and limit how much you let the dominate vocal styles contribute without leaving room for others.

3. High Energy

Energy is important to activate the mind and so keeping the group alert, energized and active helps with creative thinking.  You can do this with expression, motion, positive encouragement on every idea, toys and physical objects, and of course the facilitator should be as energetic as possible.  Speak with passion about capturing ideas and push the group to participate, keeping everyone’s energy levels up.  Provide candies, or juice or other energy foods.  Some groups might like to brainstorm in an environment that energizes them.  Perhaps music on will help, or holding a session outdoors.  Add something to the session to ensure keep a high energy level.

4. Faster is Better

Faster is related to high energy in that if you run the session quickly, you must do this with high energy to encourage people to be quick.  However, faster also means that you want the initial ideas and reactions from people as soon as they come to mind.  You don’t even want individuals filtering or moderating their own ideas before they share them (see #1).  Spontaneity and speed is what makes brainstorming really work so do everything you can to keep the group moving quickly and going fast!

5. Quantity versus Quality

If you encourage everyone to work fast, it’s more likely that you will get more ideas.  More ideas mean more options and generally this leads to much better results.

6. Encourage Wild Ideas

Wild and audacious ideas are often needed to break from a rigid problem that has no immediate or useable solution.  Since that is where brainstorming sessions are typically needed, it only makes sense to encourage

7. Build on Each Other’s Ideas

Every idea created has the potential to build more ideas.  What one person starts with can easily be shifted or modified into a whole new idea so always encourage people to modify ideas in order to keep generating more.  If you have a low point in a session without a lot of new ideas, ask people to add ideas and changes on any of the items already captured in the session.  Ask people to think of opposites to certain ideas just to spark their thinking.  Ask questions differently even when after similar results.

8. Keep on Track

This one requires a delicate balance.  You must allow ideas to diverge to new areas that might seem off topic (at least a bit) in order to let the creative process thrive and to not stifle people’s participation, yet, at the same time, you must control the group to stay on tasks so that the focus is to solve the problem at hand.  Depending on the group and individuals, things can often lead into other problems, design work on an idea or even to evaluating what will and will not work with any of those ideas (which is also judging them again).  Anytime things diverge too far, ask the group to come back to a previous idea or new ideas back on the original problem and don’t allow any further discussion on those areas off topic.  It is the not the time nor place for that and so you must keep things on track for the brainstorming itself.

9. Short Discussions

Inevitably, the will be some discussions going on for some of the ideas and while you can’t eliminate these, you can ensure they are brief.  Discussion generally leads to designing solutions or confrontation between individuals, neither belong in a brainstorming session.  Use discussions with the purpose of exploring a subject further and to lead only to new ideas and things to capture, instead of any evaluation of an idea.  Remind the group of these items when it happens and bring it back to generating ideas.

10. Capture Everything

Capturing and recording the ideas is critical to a good brainstorming session as well.  The way you do this first of all is important and you must have a method that works live in the meeting.  You want everyone to see it as many will require that visual aid to help their own creative thoughts.  I recommend using a flipchart or whiteboard as well as sticky notes for individuals to add thoughts onto that can quickly be put up in front of everyone.

When other point of capturing ideas is to capture EVERYTHING.  This again goes back to the most important rule of deferring judgment because if you choose what to capture and not to capture from people’s ideas, you are really filtering them out and you impact those who’s ideas that were not captured and they will be less likely to keep contributing if you have “filtered” out their ideas.

11. Organize and Filter AFTER the Brainstorm

Don’t attempt to organize or filter anything while you are looking for ideas and in the brainstorming session.  This turns on logical thinking and will suppress the creative mind from producing more ideas.  Stay focused on the brainstorm and wait to do any organizing and filtering of those ideas afterwards.  If you need the same people or plan to do it in the same session make sure you have some break because switching modes as you want the ideas to stir in the minds of those involved before switching back to task mode.  Give people a chance to add more ideas in that break and to think on them individually.

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 7 Comments »

Several weeks ago, I wrote a few articles on Creativity (Mental , Social and Innovation ) and there are many other tools and processes related to creativity that deserve attention.  Brainstorming is one of them and in this article, I’ll look at how to set and prepare for an effective brainstorming session and in my next article, I’ll explore the rules to follow in the brainstorming session itself.

Suit ALL 3 Learning and Communication Styles

Every individual learns differently and communicates in different ways but there are three distinct types of learners and communicators:

• Audible
• Visual
• Kinesthetic

You need to ensure your brainstorming environment and process will tailor to all three by providing an audible setting (this is obviously most common in a meeting style of environment).  Also visual aids can boost the creative thinking.  Provide additional tools and visual guides like white boards, flipcharts, sticky notes and even toys or gadgets can help people be more creative.  For kinesthetic participants, they need to interact with things and have feelings during the meeting so plan to include interactive participation and ask specifically to brainstorm about feelings things will generate as well, as those feelings will lead to even more ideas!

Optimize the Environment

The environment should have the space it needs to allow people to flow around the room, just like you’ll expect from the ideas being generated.  To encourage the creative process, let people decide how to arrange the room themselves if at all possible.  Not everyone works based facing others as it’s confrontational, while others will excel from that if competition is their nature.  Some will need to see the ideas, some just hear them, so its best to let individuals arrange themselves so they are comfortable and ready to participate in their own way that works best for them.

Facilitator

A good brainstorming facilitator ideally is experienced with the process and needs to easily handle and follow the rules to ensure the brainstorming session is effective.  All these rules will be explored in the next article but in summary, the facilitator is required to engage everyone, capture notes and lead the process to ensure ideas are flowing, explored for branching and not holding up the process.  The facilitator doesn’t need to participate in the creative brainstorm but any good facilitator will do so, since they are likely a very creative thinker themselves if they’d been involved in a lot of brainstorming sessions.

Provide Background Ahead of Time

Brainstorming is about sharing, expanding and building a set of ideas on some topic.  However, not everyone will have immediate and spontaneous ideas so you should always provide some background information about the problem or topic before the session itself.  This ensures it gives attendees time to process and think about it before the session.  It will stir in their subconscious and likely, they will come to a brainstorming session with several ideas in mind to build on with the group.  Not everyone needs this but it ensures that people are prepared and comfortable with the topic before hand and it gives them a chance to ask questions prior to the session so it can be used for brainstorming without distractions and delay.

People Diversity

This is an important one for creative thinking.  You need to have a diverse group of people, with different styles, experience levels, positions, backgrounds or any other way to diversify a group for brainstorming.  The last thing you want for brainstorming is a group of like minded individuals who all think the same.  You simple won’t get enough variation or “outside the box” thinking without diversification.  Sometimes people who don’t know much or anything about the topic can have the best idea so you want to ensure you diversify the group.

Creative Warm-up

And finally, the last step you should do in preparing for an effective brainstorming session is to be kick start the creative thoughts in the group by having a creative warm-up exercise. Something simple and fun works well to gets warm up for a few minutes with an exercise anyone can participate in.  One I like is to have a common everyday simple object and have the group list all the uncommon things that could be used for.  Use a pencil, rock, plant, shoe, door, toothbrush or any other common object people interact with and list out other uses.  This gets the mind thinking on NEW ideas and it quickly encourages weird ideas,  which is important to allow for brainstorming.

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 10 Comments »

This article continues with the topic of the imaginative mind and today I’ve cover another look at creativity, but from the social aspect this time.  If you missed the last article, here it is:  The Imaginative Mind: Mental Creativity

Cycles of Creativity

Creativity is very much a process, not a single event and so there are cycles of creativity in our actions and thoughts.  Some days creativity just flows and others, it seems so distant.  These cycles exist within our minds in all the same areas covered from the previous section on mental creativity but now we’ll look at it these cycles in a larger social environment.  The same type of cycles where creativity is obvious, encouraged, built on, extended and heavily supported occurs in all kinds of social arenas.

• friendships and relationship
• organizations and clubs
• businesses and work groups

Even larger segments like geographic regions, industries, municipalities or media exposure groups can experience these up and down cycles of creativity.  All of these cycles occur because of creative influence that either inspires or suppresses creativity throughout that social sphere and it cascades the effects.  The same reasons why brainstorming is useful to the mind to spark new ideas and keep associations active in the mind applies here to social creativity.  Each idea feeds the ideas of others, expanding the creative impact to larger groups.  Things that stifle creativity make a similar impact by slowing down or eliminating the connections for creativity to grow.

Impact on the Mind

Understanding how these cycles impact our work, lives and environment gives us a more accurate model to predict and control the swings that social creativity is impacted by.  Keeping active with the actions that spread creativity and avoiding some of the typical problems areas that kill creativity works in a social environment to ensure the imaginative mind has a sandbox to explore.  I believe the mind is at its best when learning, growing and building itself and it can only do this to its fullest when the imagination is active with as many options for creativity as possible.

Contributing to Creativity

There are a number of ways to contribute to socially boost your creativity.  The ones I think have the biggest impact are the following:

Eliminate Criticism and Complaining

Criticism and complaining are really the quickest things that kill creativity.  Criticism can emotionally shut down a person so quickly that the only creative thoughts they will have is of escape or revenge.  It is something that naturally transforms our minds into a completely new state unless we learn to handle criticism and control our response and state of mind consciously.

The social impact this can have can reach many people at once and unfortunately this bad behaviour can also be quite contagious.  The best thing you can do with these items to contribute more to social creativity is to eliminate criticism of others, of ideas and of actions.  The same goes for complaining since it encourages a very negative thought process not helpful in activating the imagination in any way.  Obviously eliminating these is not easy, but they can certainly be reduced and they can definitely be done in private at least in order to minimize the influence to any audience available.

Brainstorming

While I covered this in the previous article on mental creativity it is certainly applicable here in a social atmosphere as well.  Brainstorming in a group activates the imagination of the whole group and quickly allows ideas to germinate with each other and spread between everyone’s minds.  It can be done as a group on purpose with a specific topic or goal in mind or it can happen through other media with no initial intention of doing it!  Social media and viral systems are perfect examples of this as a group gains access to shared thoughts and ideas, they become enabled to share more themselves which continues to feed the process.  This type of social brainstorming happens a lot with online social groups like twitter and stumbleupon , as with all the other social networks.

Asking Questions – Question everything

Questions come about from curiosity and of course curiosity broods creativity.  Therefore, questions are a powerful action to contribute more to creativity as well.  Everything a person questions, they can learn from and gain some kind of insight from.  Questions about how and why something is how it is, leads to seeing more pieces of any puzzle and that puts the mind into a state where it has to think beyond the logic to imagine the solution before all the pieces are understood.

Questions are a huge part of a healthy learning process and they will trigger the mind to explore and wonder with curiosity at things.  I’ve written about using questions for learning and training others in this article here, Using the 5W Questions to Provide Training .  Questioning the things around you has other benefits as well, it is a useful tool to expand your relationships as well.  This is because it shows curiosity to another person.  Read about that here, Open Ended Questions .

Avoid Perfectionism

My final point in looking at social creativity and the ways to contribute to it is to avoid perfectionism.  Perfectionism slows down any creative process and it quickly strangles any new ideas from emerging as it keeps the attention on an original subject or topic while it is closely scrutinized and perfected.  There is some room to explore perfecting something with a creative look, but it is usually too focused on one thing where new ideas have no place to be explored until the first topic or item is first perfected.

Getting past perfection so that more ideas can be explored gives way to identify more possibilities and have more options to approach things with.  This applies in everything from simple day to day life plans and tasks, to complex engineering design problems or even social planning. The Pareto principle is useful with social creativity as well and that is where you apply the 80/20 rule.  Perfectionist try to get things to that 100% level and they spend most of their time and effort making very little progress once past that 80% point.

So, next in my next article, I’m going to explore how the imaginative mind is applied for innovation, which I consider to be the application of creativity.  If you are not signed up yet and don’t want to miss any future articles, please sign up for my RSS feed here or by email here .

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 15 Comments »

This article is part of a series called, "Maximum Productivity " in which I’ll explore the topic of adventure.

See the rest of the series here:
Intro: Maximum Productivity: Series Introduction
Part 1: Maximum Productivity: Perspective
Part 2: Maximum Productivity: Attitude
Part 3: Maximum Productivity: Focus
Part 4: Maximum Productivity: Persistence
Part 5: Maximum Productivity: Adventure
Part 6: Maximum Productivity: Connections

Expect the Unexpected

If there is anything you can definitely expect in learning to maximize your productivity, it’s going to be that you will have some new experiences.  Some good, some bad, some productive and some not but all will teach you something and all are useful to learn an important trait of any productivity master, the trait of adventure!

As you read in my last article about persistence, once you have that underway, you will find yourself needing to change plans and try new action steps to find what works and does not work.  This will undoubtedly bring new challenges and you will certainly have new adventures along the way.

Learn From It

As you progress with your new perspective, focus, attitude and persistence, you will be building many experiences and adventures to learn from.  Take account of what changes you’ve made in each of these areas and how it works to expand your productivity.  Adventures are also wonderful ways to remember things.  The mind wires far more associations for new experiences that are adventurous than it does for boring and unexcited regular events.  If you think that you can maximize productivity without having any adventures that excite the mind, you’ll be missing something.  Making things more exciting, taking risks, and just being more energetic in your activities is adventurous and an easy way to make tasks more fun, contagious and easier to do.

Story Telling

I’ve written about the advantages of storytelling before but looked at it with a number of advantages except that for productivity.  There is definitely a lot of advantages in having adventurous stories to help teach and learn things.  I think that the spirit that is needed for successful storytelling is the same that is needed for an adventurous spirit for productivity.  These are all similarly important for using adventure to be more productive:

• look for the positive things
• make a strong point
• highlight humorous details
• stay excited and energetic
• put expression into the way you tell it
• reuse successes and stories that work well
• paint a vivid picture in your mind
• enjoy telling and remembering it

All these things are important for an adventurous spirit and it’s that spirit that builds on your attitude and actions to be even more productive.

Connections and Relationships

While you can certainly have adventures on your own, most people would agree that they are much more memorable and exciting if you have them with other people.  These relationships built during adventures can be very deep as they don’t just connect people at a daily superficial level but in some exciting shared experience.  It feels good to share these memories with others and it definitely reinforces the desire for such adventures when they go well.  The same applies with being more productive, if you do it together with close connections and relationships, it is much more satisfying to share the successes together.  You can feed off each other and encourage each other to get through some of the difficult times and you can make a more difficult adventure much more bearable by having a friend at your side.  Becoming productive is not all easy and you will certainly reach points where it just doesn’t feel good.  That could be due to struggles, difficulties in learning new things, tough habits to break, relationships strained because of change, challenges in not know the answers or right approach.  All of these make maximizing your productivity hard and so any close connections and relationships you have to get through that are very important.

Comfort Zone

An adventurous soul is one who is not afraid to try new things and take on new challenges.  This happens only when you break out your normal life habits that feel comfortable and get into a new zone of change and unknown.  Its these areas that you will discover the most and learn about yourself.  Think about the most amazing and inspiring stories and adventures you have ever heard.  Where they about a guy who did his day job for 45 years, played golf and bingo for 20 more and then died?  No, they are about people who do the unthinkable, challenge the impossible, overcome unbeatable odds, continuously do outrageous and ridiculous things.  They are the adventures and people who have surprising events, massive change in their lives, zero or little comfort and are happy and willing to do what most consider to be a little on the side of crazy.  It’s about reaching past your everyday life and expanding it, stretching your abilities and pushing yourself and your limits farther than most are willing.  That comfort zone we settle into with a wall of possessions holds us to a level of complacency and comfort that is tough to break free of.  Change That!  Look for some adventure and get out of your comfort zone.  Do it in areas of productivity and you will discover things about yourself you never know possible.  You can do more than you ever knew and you’ll quite likely, find you enjoy it a whole lot more than you ever thought possible.

I hope I can encourage at least some of my readers here to take a serious look at this with your productivity in your life.  Whether you are a student, worker, blogger, teacher or parent, recognize the things you are repeating over and over in your life.  Do they make you happy?  Do you want more of those or is there some room for change and new adventures?  What have you always wanted to be better at but never taken a step to master?  Is there any adventures you could take to help you study and increase your productivity in your life?  I hope so.  I’d love to hear about your ideas, please comment below or add your stories of adventure

Posted by Mike King under Life | 11 Comments »