Gandhi famously said we need to become the change we want to see in
the world.
It’s an inspiring and eloquent theory for enabling progress.
Unfortunately, most people tremble at the prospect of personal transformation.
They only change when the pain of staying the same is greater than the cost to
change.
And so, perhaps it’s easier and more efficient to change our
surroundings, not ourselves. To work from the outside in. To build in external
accountabilities to absorb the heavy lifting and minimize the expenditure of
our scarce mental resources.
Crawford’s book on mind mastery explains that humans have become beset by outside
forces that destroy our focus and disrupt our peace of mind. And if we want to
get out of our heads and into the world, we should offload our thinking onto
our surroundings. That way, instead of routinely relying on our limited and
easily exhausted powers of concentration, we can encode things spatially in the
environment.
For example, the best strategy I’ve employed in twenty years of
songwriting is using a classroom style rolling whiteboard for my lyric ideas.
It’s more than tripled my musical output. Because instead of racking my brain
trying to pull the perfect lyric out of the blue, I simply scan the whiteboard.
I look for what wants to be written. I outsource the heavy lifting to my
surroundings.
This process reduces and externalizes my mental work in the
arrangement of physical space, scaffolding my abilities with environmental
props and technologies. And it makes the experience of writing songs more
relaxing, more fun, more prolific and more physically interactive.
LET ME ASK YA THIS…
How could you build a powerful support structure around your brain?
LET ME SUGGEST THIS…
For a copy of the list called, “8 More Ways to Make Your Email More Approachable,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!
* * * *
Scott Ginsberg
That Guy with the Nametag
Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.
Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.
Now booking for 2016-2017.
Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!
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