“I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details.”
Albert Einstein

The human mind is a very powerful but limited tool. It usually constrains things in a universe that it can understand.Throughout the human history there have been quite a few bright minded individuals that managed to break beyond these limits. Genius minds like Aristotle and Einstein used very efficient thinking strategies that helped them achieve great things.

Even if you’re not a genius, you can use the same strategies as them to harness the creative power of your mind and better manage your future.

You must think productively in order to find solutions to problems.

1. Attack a problem from many different perspectives. Take a step back and aproach it fom another angle. This way you learn how to restructure it in many different ways. Leonardo da Vinci felt that the first way he looked at a problem was too biased. Very often the problem reconstructs itself and becomes a new one.
2. Visualization is key. Very often words and numbers don’t play such a significant part in the thinking process. Formulate your problem in as many ways as possible, use diagrams, drawings, or anything that could have the potential to help produce a better visualisation of the problem.
3. Produce! This is a distinguishing characteristic of genius. Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents. He guaranteed productivity by giving himself and his assistants idea quotas. The most respected scientists in history produced not only great works, but also many “bad” ones. They weren’t afraid to fail. Failure is a process that is necessary in order to arive at excellence.
4. Combine and recombine ideas, images, and thoughts into different combinations no matter how unusual they would look. The laws of heredity on which the modern science of genetics is based came from the Austrian monk Grego Mendel, who combined mathematics and biology to create a new science.
5. Form relationships and make connections between dissimilar subjects. Samuel Morse invented relay stations for telegraphic signals when observing relay stations for horses.
6. Use opposite thinking. This helps suspend your thought and move your mind to a new level. Niels Bohr’s ability to imagine light as both a particle and a wave led to his conception of the principle of complementarity. Suspending thought (logic) may allow your mind to create a new form.
7. Use metaphors in your thinking process. Metaphor was considered by Aristotle as a sign of genius. He believed that the individual who had the capacity to perceive resemblances between two separate areas of existence and link them together was a person of special gifts.
8. Don’t regard failure as something unproductive. It’s well known that whenever we attempt to do something and fail, we end up doing something else. That is the first principle of creative accident. Failure can be productive if we don’t focus on it as an unproductive result. Analyze the process, its components, and how you can change them, to arrive at other results. Ask yourself “What have I done?” instead of “Why have I failed?”.

The most important point for me, with immediate use in the real world, is the last one.

What’s the most important strategy in your oppinion?

If you're new here and have found useful information, please subscribe to my RSS feed or sign up for free Email updates. There are daily updates and you should stay tuned. Thanks for visiting!