Get Smart

Get Smart reveals how you can access more of your brain’s power through simple, actionable brain training techniques that’ll spark your creativity, make you look for the positive and help you achieve your goals faster.

You might have heard that we only use 10%, or 2%, or some low share of our brain. That’s a myth. We don’t use all of our brain’s cells simultaneously, but we do use 100% over the course of a 24-hour day. What we use them for, however, is a different story.

When I started my seminar on family business this semester, the teacher told us a story.

The men are all right, but all just to some degree. They’ve all correctly identified one aspect of an elephant, but nobody was able to see the whole picture. It’s always hard to think of overarching themes and high-level connections, but at least make an attempt.

Even if you fail to see the whole, you’ll still see more than most people. And you sure won’t be blind.

Brian makes a great analogy about human thoughts: they’re like bubbles in a champagne glass. Everything is fizzing, all the time, but the bubbles pop fast too. Often, the spark fizzles out soon and the bubbles were, well, just filled with air.

A whopping 1,500 words rush through your head every minute, while at the same time, dozens of cognitive biases work against your quest to find out what’s true and important. In his 2011 book, Thinking Fast And Slow, nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman differentiates between the two systems in our mind: one fast and intuitive, the other slow and deliberate. In our modern world, very few situations require us to think fast, but that system is where all information first lands!

It takes a conscious effort to get new input from the fast system to the slow system and that’s exactly what Brian suggests. Slow down. Make time for thinking. Especially when it comes to your long-term goals.

10 minutes a day spent on how you can end up where you want to be in five years will make your champagne fizzle a lot longer.

One style of thinking that’s been systemically trained out of us for the past 110 years, but is becoming more important by the minute, is creative thinking. Since the dawn of the assembly line, workers have been trained to think as mechanically as the machines they operate and now it costs us dearly. Mechanical thinking only works in extremes: great successes or total failures. It blocks our path to improvement. Think of a restaurant you know that’s had the same menu for 15 years. How long do you think they’ll remain open? And if…