Tag Archives: creative thinking

Seeing More Than Meets the Eye

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Yogi Berra’s contention that you “can observe a lot just by watching,” may be more profound than simply a pedestrian statement of the obvious especially from the Hall of Fame baseball player famed as much for his mishits with words as his hits with a bat.

Consider the following examples where focused concentration and heightened observation kindled the crucible of creativity and converted the ordinary into something extra-ordinary . For example:

Imagine a chicken coup behind that fence and imagine seeing a fox clawing through to get the chicken and ending up with nothing but feathers. That’s how Eli Whitney got the idea of the claw-like machine that would pull the cotton fiber through a fence-like grid. Yogi was right: You can observe a lot just by watching.

Photo by Wilson Malone on Pexels.com

Imagine if you saw a wasp chewing wood into a paper-like paste to build its nest. That’s how a French scientist Rene de Reaumur first got the idea for using wood as a resource for making paper. Yogi was right: You can observe a lot just by watching.

Imagine if you took a walk in the woods and you observed how the hooks on the burrs and loops in the cotton fabric stuck together on your socks. That how Swiss engineer Georges de Mistral invented Velcro. Yogi was right: You can observe a lot just by watching.

Photo by Vlad Cheu021ban on Pexels.com

And finally, imagine if you were driving on road through a hay field and you noticed the linear pattern as farmers harvested — row by row -just like Philo T. Farnsworth did. The teenager’s row-by-row observation gave him the idea of scanning to display a picture – row by row -that led to the invention of the television screen. Yogi was right: You can observe a lot just by watching.

For more ideas on expanding your creative thinking, consider reading THINKING Like a Leader, a Leadership Mints Series Book.

THINKING Like a Leader, With Clarity is the first book in the Leadership Mints Series that develops your sense of purpose and perspective in creating, concentrating and collaborating.
The 292-page book is comprised of 77 Leadership Mints-bite-sized idea on leadership principles that like a candy mint are quickly savored and immediately rejuvenating to refresh your feeling for leading. Readers savor ImproveMINTS: a one-line summary of the of the key learning in that Leadership Mint.

GET YOUR COPY OF THINKING Like a Leader

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WHAT IS A LEADERSHIP MINT?

Consumed like a breath mint — quick and on-the-go — a Leadership Mint is a bite-sized idea that energizes leadership behaviors and personalizes leadership principles so they are more easily remembered, more readily acted upon and more fully applied.

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Leadership Mints Series Sampler: Counter-Intuitive Thinking

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Your 5-year-old has an ear-ache and your 1-month old is suffering from colic and now your parenting skills are calling on you to act quickly and decisively like the leader you are in the office.

You grab your phone to call your doctor just like you always have done in a situation like this.

But then you stop and do something completely different. And that counter-intuitive decision makes all the difference.

You call a doctor who has as much medical training as other MD’s, Medical Doctors — 8 years of studying the same basic sciences as doctors of medicine from physiology to endocrinology — yet they use different treatment protocols.

You hear the voice in your head saying that maybe you should try this alternative approach to solving pain. After all, you’ve been researching alternative treatments for colic and ear aches.

You are intrigued that there are doctors who have a proven record of alleviating pain without prescribing drugs.

You call a chiropractor, more formally credentialed as doctor of chiropractic .

Well-informed on the anatomy of the human body, the chiropractor aligns the 45 miles of nerves networking through the human body and more fully connects the body’s 206 bones and 639 muscles to ease pain.

After a few treatments, the colic subsides. The ear-ache goes away. Your penchant for researching and problem-solving paid off.

And now life is good again thanks to your leadership in consistently learning new ways to solve old problems even more quickly and completely.

As a creative thinker do you open the doors to greater opportunity with the 3 Keys of the most effective leaders: forward-leaning, other-directed, owner’s mindset?

As a leader, do you consider other options before making a decision? Or do you do what you have always done even if the results are mixed?

To stimulate your counter-intuitive decision making skills, consider purchasing a 280-page book that is available now on Amazon.com.

It is titled THINKING LIKE A LEADER.

That book on thinking like a leader is the first of three books in The Leadership Mints Series designed to help leaders refresh their feeling for leading with short stories (called Leadership Mints) you can grab ‘n go like a candy mint.

The two others books focus on leading with empathy LOVING LIKE A LEADER and leading with civility SPEAKING LIKE A LEADER.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Be Unreasonable To Be A Leader

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By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to stir your creative juice way beyond your comfort zone. Reading time: 2:14.

To get ahead, be unreasonable.
No you don’t have to become demanding or condescending.
No, you don’t have to sharpen your arrogance or deepen your ignorance.

Just be willing to squeeze your creative juice without rhyme or reason. As author George Bernard Shaw noted:

“Reasonable men adapt themselves
to their environment, unreasonable men
try to adapt their environment to themselves.
Thus all progress is the result of the
efforts of unreasonable men.”

Leaders, by definition, are unreasonable. Here are a few examples of unreasonable behavior that may spark your own flair for the unreasonable.

A freezing rain blankets the nearby ski slopes. Your eyes are nearly frozen shut. So what? Be unreasonable. That’s what Ed Pauls did. He invented a pulley-driven machine he could use to go snow skiing indoors. He invented the Nordic Track in 1975.

It’s a cold snowy day in New York. So what? Be unreasonable and write a song about the balmy south. That’s what Dan Emmett did and today we sing his song --Dixie-with a happy go lucky zip :

“I wish I was in Dixie”

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