By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to use music as a strategic thinking tool. Reading time: 3:09

How do you fine tune your creative thinking skills?

Albert Einstein

With a fine tune.

Albert Einstein chose to play the violin to help him relax and problem solve more readily, according to his son, Hans Albert.

Whenever Albert Einstein felt that he had come to the “end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music. That would usually resolve all his difficulties,” Hans Albert recalled of his dad’s String Theory of a Different Kind.

At any rate, music just may be the oil in the engine of creative and strategic thinking. In fact, some of the world’s most renowned thinkers -leaders -were musically talented:

Galileo, the son of a musician, played a guitar like instrument called the lute.
Thomas Jefferson played the violin.
Ben Franklin, who invented the glass harmonica, played the guitar and harp.
Henry David Thoreau played the flute.
Albert Schweitzer played the organ.

Leaders like Galileo and Thomas Jefferson embrace the way vibrating sounds of music form patterns and create energy fields.

Leaders like Henry David Thoreau and Albert Schweitzer, embrace the way music can favorably influence blood pressure, muscle tension, and skin temperature.

Leaders embrace the way music can play a healing role in ancient Chinese medicine for a variety of ailments ranging from constipation to headaches.

Music Sinks Deep Into the Soul

Albert Schweitzer playing the organ

By any measure, music enhances results.

Mozart’s music helps math students learn more effectively and cows produce more milk.

And now hospital coronary units prescribe Mozart’s music as an equivalent to a small dose of Valium to ease pain, according to Don Campbell’s book The Mozart Effect.

Maybe that’s why Plato said that music was a: “rhythm and harmony “ that sank “deep into the caverns of the soul” and took “the strongest hold there, bringing grace to the body and mind.”

Leonardo da Vinci, the famed artist and inventor who also played a variety of string instruments, thought that music could bring grace to the body and the mind.

That’s why he hired musicians to play while Mona Lisa posed for him. Leonardo da Vinci thought the music would brighten her spirits and heighten her smile. Not sure he realized that brightened effect would last more than 500 years.

No wonder that Albert Einstein once said that had he not been a scientist, he would have been a musician.

“Life without playing music is in-conceivable for me,” Einstein declared. “A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man (or woman) need to be happy?

Or better tune into his or her thoughts?

Today’s ImproveMINT

Play or listen to music to keep your leadership thinking in mint condition.

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