Mind Over Matter
What would you do if someone handed you a difficult problem to solve right now? Would you don your thinking cap, look up to the right, touch your chin, knit your brow, shrug your shoulders, then throw your hands up in the air after a few minutes, declaring the problem to be impossible to solve? Would you search your memory banks for how you or someone solved a similar problem in the past and, coming up empty-handed, search Google to see if and how others might have solved it? Would you immediately and instinctively launch into a concerted effort to brainstorm top-of-mind solutions in a shotgun fashion, hoping that some mental spaghetti might stick to the wall? Would you smile, surrender, confess to having no clue, ask for the solution, then upon hearing it, slap your forehead and cry, “Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?” Would you experience a sudden creative insight, see the solution immediately, but then second-guess yourself, unconsciously judging your solution to be too simplistic and too obvious to be a good one, and voluntarily kill a great idea?
Hard for me to say, because I don’t know you. But the odds of you doing something very similar are very good. In fact, you will probably do it sometime today. Meanwhile, that nasty problem goes unsolved.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
I intended this book to be a mindful guide—complete with a super-curated set of battle-tested tools—for using our minds to win the games our brains are hardwired to play on us, the patterns of tricks that while effective in handling routine problems and quick-fix situations, become traps when we need to invoke our best thinking. This struggle of mind over matter is the brain game. (See what I did there? I made a distinction between the mind and the brain. Keep that in mind as you read on.)
I stumbled on these patterns over 10 years ago in my role as a professional facilitator, working with Toyota’s U.S.-based corporate university. We were using a few different thought challenges, based on real business stories, as icebreakers for a course called Principled Problem-Solving. We were surprised first by how many people failed to solve the challenges, second by the redundancy in the solutions offered up, and third, but most importantly, by the repetitive nature of thinking and behavior patterns.
I left my gig with Toyota after spending eight years with them, but kept using similar, real-world thought challenges in workshops, seminars, and speaking engagements all over the world. No matter where I went or to whom I gave the problems, the results were eerily similar. Over 100,000 people have now gone through these exercises with me, and in spite of all that has been discovered and written about the brain and the mind during the past three decades, I continue to observe these patterns. The evidence I’ve collected is overwhelming, and points to seven readily observable behaviors, which I call fatal flaws of thinking . . . mental glitches, if you will, that if left unchecked may just leave us wondering why our deepest problems never get solved.
I confess that I never set out to conduct a long-term study, for I am neither scientist nor scholar. I’m far better at applying all those wonderful scientific discoveries and putting into practice what scholars propose in theoretical frameworks, to see whether what they say should work actually does in the real world. In that way, I’m much more like the jeweler seeking to fix a stuck gear in a wristwatch than the philosopher pontificating on a theory of time.
When it comes to the frontiers of consciousness and cognition, I have neither the inclination nor intelligence to study or explain in any real depth the vastly complex inner workings of our grey matter. I can’t even pronounce most parts of the brain cited in books and articles. Furthermore, that territory is quite well-traversed, from the work of early-twentieth-century Gestalt psychologists to modern day fMRI-wielding cognitive neuroscientists, and widely available in myriad other books and articles. It is best for all concerned that I simply summon and synthesize all that amazing insight and point it toward my real worry, which is how to master our greatest asset—our mind—to our best advantage in winning the brain game. (Catch that? I did it again.)
Nor do I wish to delve deeply into the rather broad and nebulous space we call creativity, and creative problem solving. I’m far more interested in removing the obstacles that may be blocking one’s naturally creative mind from more regularly producing the brilliance I know it’s capable of. In that sense, this book is more like a repair manual that helps your mind fix the seven fatal thinking flaws your brain commits. (Third time!) If I could change the world in one single way, that would be it. It’s the great ambition of this little book, and if Malcolm Gladwell is correct in asserting that little things can make a big difference, the odds may just tip in my favor.
The question, of course, is how to effect such a tip? First, by exposing these flaws to the widest audience possible. I’ll need your help to do that. Second, by revealing a tad of the mechanics behind why they are so prevalent. I’m fortunate to have spent time with some of the foremost psychologists and neuroscientists, and this much I know from working with them: there is a significant distinction between the brain and the mind. The brain is passive hardware, absorbing experience, and the mind is active software, directing our attention. But not just any software—it’s intelligent software capable of rewiring the hardware. I could not have said that with confidence a few decades ago, but modern science is a wonderful thing.
The third and final way is by introducing you to the seven “fixes”—tools and techniques that I as well as others have developed, and which through my work I have found to be among the most effective and practical ways to not only neutralize the fatal flaws of thinking, but also forge new neural connections in the brain.
I will ask you to keep a simple mantra in mind at all times:
What appears to be the problem, isn’t.
What appears to be the solution, isn’t.
What appears to be impossible, isn’t.
This book represents a short and user-friendly distillation of everything I’ve learned in my three decades of facilitating and coaching individuals and teams as they pursue their most important challenges. In an effort to continuously improve my own and others’ mental capability, I’ve watched tens of thousands of people, incorporated the work of highly regarded scientists, scholars, and strategists, experimented with hundreds of both original and borrowed techniques, and made hundreds of mistakes. My aim is to spare you from having to do all that on your own. It is a book that is meant not simply to be read, but to be used. Again and again. Not a bad deal for 20 bucks.
While I cannot grant you the gift of flawless thinking, it is indeed the thought that counts.