The Seventh Sense: How Flashes of Insight Change Your Life 9780231539432

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Ideas for Life
2. Find your Dream: An Italian Epiphany
3. Examples from History: Indian Men and English Women
4. Presence of Mind: City of Light
5. Flash of Insight: Magical Science
6. Resolution: The Art of Passion
7. Free Your Mind: From Stress to Strategy
8. Personal Strategy Map: In Search of Passion
9. Idea Networking: In Search of Opportunity
10. Conclusion: Your Seventh Sense
Appendix A: Seventh Sense Toolkit
Appendix B: Personal Strategy Maps
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Seventh Sense

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2015 William Duggan All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Duggan, William R. The seventh sense : how flashes of insight change your life / William Duggan. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-16906-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53943-2 (ebook) 1. Insight. 2. Creative ability. 3. Creative thinking. 4. Epiphanies. 5. Change (Psychology) I. Title. BF449.5.D84 2015 153.3—dc23 2014045625

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover design: Noah Arlow References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For Lynn and Emmaline

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

1. Introduction: Ideas for Life 1 2. Find Your Dream: An Italian Epiphany 8 3. Examples from History: Indian Men and English Women 22 4. Presence of Mind: Your City of Light 33 5. Flash of Insight: Magical Science 47 6. Resolution: The Art of Passion 59 7. Free Your Mind: From Stress to Strategy 72

Contents

8. Personal Strategy Map: In Search of Passion 94 9. Idea Networking: In Search of Opportunity 112 10. Conclusion: Your Seventh Sense 126 Appendix A: Seventh Sense Toolkit 131 Appendix B: Personal Strategy Maps 143 Bibliography Index

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169

Acknowledgments

i thank my many mba and Executive students who put so much of themselves into the “personal strategy” part of the course that I teach at Columbia Business School. I and this book have benefited greatly from their work and thought. Some of their work appears in these pages. I offer special thanks to Hana Reznikov, an MBA graduate who pushed me to write up that part of the course so that she and others have something to pass on to their friends and relatives who might find it useful too. This book is the result. And I owe a debt to the publisher, Myles Thompson, whose unfailing and creative support has served as inspiration for me for many years now. And then there is the editor, Bridget Flannery-McCoy. As you might guess from our names, she and I are both of Irish stock. So please forgive my blasphemy, but if you saw this manuscript before and after she got her hands on it, you would know that I do not exaggerate when I say: St. Bridget performed another miracle.

The Seventh Sense

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Introduction Ideas for Life

it goes by many names: A flash of insight. The Eureka moment. A spark of genius. The big “Aha!” An epiphany. It’s the moment when a new idea forms in your head, and you suddenly see a way to accomplish something meaningful in your life. All the great minds, all the great leaders, all the great achievers have had at least one of these moments. And you can too. That’s because in recent years, thanks to the modern science of the brain, we know enough now about flashes of insight to take full advantage of this mysterious power of the human mind. That’s what this book is about. Here I call it the “seventh sense.” You know about your five senses—smell, taste, touch, sight, and hearing. Scientists

Introduction

have studied them for hundreds of years. What you might not realize is that your five senses are mental abilities. A sensation starts at your nose, your tongue, your skin, your eye, or your ear, but then nerve cells connect it to your brain, and that’s when it becomes a “sense.” Your nose takes in an odor, and your brain turns it into the smell of warm rain. Your tongue feels a tang, and your brain turns it into the taste of lime. Your ear hears a sound, and your brain makes it birdsong. The key way your brain turns sensation into sense is through memory. Modern neuroscience has revealed the importance of memory in how humans make sense of the world—starting with your five basic senses. You recognize the smell of a rose because you’ve smelled it before. It’s in your memory. If you smell an odor and can’t tell what it is, that’s because it’s not in your memory: you can’t make sense of the sensation. If you smell something and think it’s familiar but can’t place it, your brain searches your memory to identify what it is. Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize in 2000 for his pioneering work on how the brain learns and remembers. He says in his Nobel speech: For me, learning and memory have proven to be endlessly fascinating mental processes because they address one of the fundamental features of human activity: our ability to acquire new ideas from experience and to retain these ideas in memory. In fact, most of the ideas we have about the world and our civilization we have learned so that we are who we are in good measure because of what we have learned and what we remember.

Learning and memory play a key role in the sixth sense too. The most common name for this sense is “intuition.” You

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Introduction

make a snap judgment, or you get a feeling about something because you’ve seen it before in some other situation—even if you can’t quite recall what exactly that situation was. Herbert Simon won the Nobel Prize in 1978 for his work on intuition and memory, and today Gary Klein is one of the field’s leading scholars. Malcolm Gladwell’s popular book Blink presented recent research on the power and pitfalls of the sixth sense. Think firefighters, emergency room nurses, or soldiers in battle. They all make quick decisions that repeat in some way what they’ve done before. They all have a strong sixth sense. As you get better and faster each time you do some complex task, that builds up your sixth sense. If you’ve ever mastered a musical instrument or any kind of sport, you know what it’s like to have a sixth sense. Or if you walk into a meeting and know exactly what’s going on, before anyone explains it—that’s your sixth sense in action. It’s a form of déjà vu. You’ve seen some version of the situation before, and your brain calls it up from your personal memory. That’s the power of the sixth sense. But there’s one situation where it doesn’t work at all, and can actually lead to you make the wrong decisions: when you think you’re seeing the same situation, but you’re not. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow is full of clever experiments that made even experts jump to the wrong conclusions. Their sixth sense failed them. You can probably recall times yourself when your intuition was wrong—when you followed your gut and it turned out to be a mistake. That’s because you recognized something familiar, but the rest of the situation was new. Your intuition only works when you encounter something very similar to what you’ve seen before. If the situation is new, your sixth sense isn’t enough. For a new situation, you need a new idea. And your sixth sense cannot give it to you. Your intuition gives you the same

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Introduction

idea, again, faster and better with each repetition. For new situations, for new ideas, you need something else. You need the seventh sense. The seventh sense is the mechanism of the human mind that produces new ideas. It’s the epiphany, the flash of insight, the Eureka moment—in the form of an idea you never had before. And in its highest, rarest form, it’s an idea that no one else had before either. The seventh sense is how new ideas are born. And not just new ideas, but useful ideas. Human achievement advances through flashes of insight that come from the seventh sense. Some new ideas lead to major changes in how the world works, but the majority of them just change the world of one person. Behind the scenes, lost to history, are millions of new and useful ideas that solve individual problems of life or work. A painful family or romantic relationship might call for a new and useful idea to heal it, and to solve that problem you need the seventh sense. Or a project gets bogged down at work, and you need a new idea to save it. These personal creative ideas, for work or life, are just as important for advancing human achievement and the quality of our lives as great innovations like electric light or the personal computer. And they happen in your brain in exactly the same way too. All of them come from the seventh sense. Yet as you might guess, you cannot will an epiphany to happen. You can’t squeeze it out of your brain like toothpaste from a tube. It just comes to you, and you suddenly see it. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t improve your seventh sense and improve your likelihood of these “aha” moments. The epiphany itself is just one of four steps that together make up the seventh sense. Two other steps come before the epiphany, to prime your mind to allow the flash of insight to happen. The fourth step comes after, to help ensure that you

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Introduction

put the flash to good use. While the flash of insight may be spontaneous, these other three steps are within your control. With practice, you can improve your seventh sense, and learn to make the most of it. That’s what this book is about. In chapter 6 I’ll tell you how I found out about the seventh sense some ten years ago. Since then I’ve taught what it is and how best to use it to thousands of students in my classes at Columbia Business School and at professional workshops around the world. I’ve written before about how professionals and organizations can use it to come up with new business ideas. In this book I explain how to use it in your personal life. My students asked me to write it. They wanted it for themselves, to refer back to as they applied what they learned in class to their lives after graduation. And they wanted to give it to family and friends for them to learn too. You will hear more about some of these students and see some of their work in the chapters to come. One thing I quickly found out from teaching the ideas in this book is that your personal life includes your work life. In a typical month, you spend more of your waking time working than with your family and friends, or alone. And your thoughts about your work include its personal side: for example, how to fulfill your interests and passions at your current job, whether to look for a different job, how to deal with difficult people at work, or how much time and thought to devote to work versus the other parts of your life. And new ideas in your work are personal too: innovation is always a risk, and takes personal commitment on the part of the innovator. So having new ideas at work, and deciding whether or not to commit to them, is part of personal strategy too. My main goal is to show you how to develop your seventh sense to create new and useful ideas for changing something about your life. As you might guess, that turns out to be very

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Introduction

different from improving your sixth sense. To build up your sixth sense, you pick the activity you want to learn and then practice, practice, practice. Each time you do it, your sixth sense grows. But the sixth sense doesn’t travel. If you have a sixth sense about one thing, such as playing the guitar, that doesn’t help your sixth sense about something else, such as learning French. You can only improve your sixth sense activity by activity. You cannot improve your sixth sense in general. The seventh sense, on the other hand, is a general skill. You can improve your ability to have new ideas of any kind. You can learn the right mental steps to prepare your brain for a flash of insight, and you can learn how to follow through after it happens. You cannot predict what the epiphany will be—after all, it’s a new idea—or when it will come. And each epiphany will be different. The sixth sense helps you do the same thing better and better, while the seventh sense gives you something new. Asking your sixth sense to give you a new idea is like asking a horse to fly. The sixth sense can do many great things, but an epiphany is not one of them. The first half of this book shows you how the seventh sense works. You will learn the science behind it, how it differs from your other mental abilities, and the details of the four steps that make it up. The second half of the book gives you a set of practical tools and exercises that lead you through the discovery of your own seventh sense, help you improve it, and show where you can use it best for new ideas in your life. And along the way, you’ll see examples of great innovators and leaders who got their ideas through the seventh sense. By seeing the seventh sense in them, you can see it in yourself. Smell, taste, touch, sight, and hearing: these five senses give you ordinary ideas, based on common sensations that other

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Introduction

people have too. The sixth sense—intuition—gives you good ideas based on your own personal experience. The seventh sense gives you new ideas that go beyond what you’ve ever known or thought before. It’s how you see something new, do something new, and sometimes even become someone new. In the end, I hope this book can help you find the answer to one of the most important questions you can ever ask: “What should I do with my life?” We’ve all known times when the honest answer is: “I have no idea!” That’s when you need the seventh sense. It gives you that idea.

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Find Your Dream An Italian Epiphany

it starts out as an ordinary business trip to a trade show for housewares. Nothing special, except for the location: Milan, Italy. Of course you jump at the chance to go. Your name is Howard Schultz, and the year is 1983. You’re thirty years old. It’s your first trip to Italy. You work for a coffee company named Starbucks, in Seattle, Washington. Starbucks has six stores around the city, and they all sell high-quality coffee beans for customers to make coffee back home. A customer comes in and scoops the coffee beans from a bin to fill a brown paper bag. Some customers grind the beans there in the store, and some have a grinder at home. On the plane to Milan, if you’re thinking about your job at all, your mind is on the trade show ahead: how to fix up the Starbucks stores with the latest and best equipment. But there are lots of other things in the back of your mind that have nothing to do with your trip. For example,

Find Your Dream

you know the difference between Robusta and Arabica coffee. Robusta beans come from hot tropical lowlands, like Brazil or the Ivory Coast, while Arabica beans come from cool tropical highlands, like Guatemala, Ethiopia, or Java. Robusta is much cheaper than Arabica and much more common in America. You find Robusta at roadside diners and in the cans of ground coffee in supermarkets. Robusta beans are bitter, so you usually drink the coffee weak. Arabica, on the other hand, is not bitter, so you can drink it stronger, and that means each cup has much more flavor. Starbucks sells Arabica only. The only way to make excellent coffee at home is to buy Arabica beans from a store like Starbucks. But that kind of store is rare. With only six locations, Starbucks is the biggest Arabica chain in all the United States. Your plane lands in Milan. The trade show is downtown, and so is your hotel. You arrive late, get a good night’s sleep, and the next morning you walk to the trade show. The streets of downtown Milan are a treat, lined with beautiful old buildings and lively with everyone walking to work. You notice a coffee bar. You can’t resist it. You go inside. Right away, you love it. You can smell the coffee—smooth Arabica. Italians stand at the bar with their cups, chatting to each other and with the barista behind the counter working the espresso machine. You see cappuccino, regular coffee, caffè latte. You order an espresso yourself. Heavenly. You finish your coffee and continue on to the trade show. You see another coffee bar on the same block, and another at the corner. Then another on the next block down. They’re all busy, filled with Italians chatting away over their morning coffee. You’ve never seen anything like it. In Schultz’s own words: My mind started churning.

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Find Your Dream

You go to the trade show, and at the end of the day you walk back to your hotel. You stop in at another coffee bar. You order another espresso. As you sip it, you take in the scene around you. And then: I had a revelation: Starbucks had missed the point— completely missed it. This is so powerful. . . . It was like an epiphany. It was so immediate and physical that I was shaking. It seemed so obvious. Starbucks sold great coffee beans, but we didn’t serve coffee by the cup. . . . If we could re-create in America the authentic Italian coffee bar culture, it might resonate with other Americans the way it did with me. Starbucks could be a great experience, and not just a great retail store.

In just one moment—a single epiphany—your life changes forever. You take the Italian coffee bar back to Starbucks, and the result is a worldwide empire that no one—including you—could possible foresee. That flash of insight in the Milan coffee bar is your seventh sense in action. That’s not the whole story, of course—there’s plenty of hard work ahead, myriad twists and turns, decades of ups and downs—but the story only exists at all because of that single flash. Schultz gives all these details of how he came up with the idea for Starbucks in his book Pour Your Heart Into It. There we get a rare glimpse into how exactly the seventh sense works. Flashes of insight happen all the time, but most accounts of human achievement leave them out. We learn what the achievers did, but not how they got the idea to do it. Even in a memoir, the author typically recounts the many struggles, the highs and lows, the allies and obstacles, and the dramatic events along the way. But we seldom see that

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one brief moment: the birth of the idea itself. That’s because thousands of other, stronger memories come after the idea, crowding the epiphany out of the achiever’s memory. Schultz is a very rare case of someone who remembers clearly the exact moment of realization—even better, he tells us. Because Schultz provides so much detail, we can use his case to map out each component of his seventh sense. The five basic senses and the sixth—intuition—all come from memory. As it turns out, the seventh sense comes from memory too. Eric Kandel’s work on learning and memory explains all thought as recombinations of information that your brain takes in and stores in your memory. We can see how this works for the five senses: you think “rose” when you smell one only if you’ve smelled a rose before. And we see how it works for the sixth sense: you can guess what your friends will do when they’re angry because you’ve seen them angry before. But the seventh sense is for new situations, for new ideas: How can learning and memory apply to that? The answer is actually quite simple, at least in theory. In practice, it’s not very simple at all. The basic mechanism of the seventh sense is a new combination of previous elements. The elements are not new: the combination is new. And those elements combine slowly, because your brain takes time to search through all its memories to find the ones that fit together. When they do come together, that’s the flash of insight. Those memories include your personal experience, but also what you’ve read, heard, and seen—in other words, everything you’ve learned. The epiphany happens in an instant, but the brain activity behind it takes much longer. That’s why you have your best ideas when your mind is relaxed. You give your brain the freedom to wander around your memory. When it finds a combination of elements that solves a problem important to you, that’s your Eureka moment.

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Find Your Dream

When people describe these moments, as Schultz does, we typically find the same features: a new combination of previous elements comes together in a relaxed mind. In their book, The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee give a recent example. Kary Mullis won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a now ubiquitous technique for replicating DNA sequences. When the idea first came to him on the nighttime drive in California, though, he almost dismissed it out of hand. As he recounted in his Nobel Award speech, “Somehow, I thought, it had to be an illusion.  .  .  . It was too easy. . . . There was not a single unknown in the scheme. Every step involved had already been done already.” All Mullis did was recombine well-understood techniques in biochemistry to generate a new one. A close look at Mullis’s speech shows that he actually had three flashes of insight, one right after the other. You may not understand the chemistry—I know I don’t—but you’ll see that Mullis sounds much like Schultz at the moment of revelation: EUREKA!!!! The result would be exactly the same only the signal strength would be doubled. EUREKA again!!!! I could do it intentionally, adding my own deoxynucleoside triphosphates, which were quite soluble in water and legal in California. And again, EUREKA!!!! I could do it over and over again. Every time I did it I would double the signal . . . I stopped the car at mile marker 46.7 on Highway 128. In the glove compartment I found some paper and a pen . . . “Dear Thor!” I exclaimed. I had solved the most annoying problems in DNA chemistry in a single lightning bolt.

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Find Your Dream

In chapter 5 I look further into the science of the relaxed brain and how it makes these new connections. Here I turn to another scholarly tradition for a practical way to break down the seventh sense into steps you can learn and do yourself. That tradition is military strategy, where generals and scholars alike have long grappled with the problem of how to come up with new ideas in new situations. All strategic problems are new, by definition—strategy tells you what to do in the future, and the future is never exactly the same as the past. So your strategy always needs a new idea. Military strategy is the origin of business strategy, which in turn begat the modern field of personal strategy—how to figure out what to do in your life. The first great modern scholar of strategy was Carl von Clausewitz of Prussia. His book, On War, is the single most famous book of strategy in the Western world. It came out in 1832, and it’s still in print today, still studied at universities and military academies around the world. Clausewitz knew nothing about neuroscience, of course, but his analysis of strategic thinking matches to a striking degree what the science of memory tells us about our seventh sense. Clausewitz outlines four elements that make up the seventh sense: r
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Let’s take each element in turn. The first one, examples from history, gives you the content of your epiphany. A flash of insight combines examples from history—that is, examples of what people did to achieve

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Find Your Dream

things in the past. Your brain takes in these examples and stores them in your memory for possible use in the future. This happens naturally, from the moment you’re born. That’s how you learned to walk, to talk, to eat, to dress, to do most of what you know how to do: by learning what other people did, and then doing it yourself. As you grow older and keep on learning, you have more and more examples to draw from, and these become the building blocks for your own ideas of what to do yourself in the future. Take Schultz. That first morning, the Italian coffee bar entered his memory as an example from history. In the evening, his epiphany made this example from history a part of his new idea for Starbucks—but only a part. He did not say to himself, “I’ll open an Italian coffee bar in America.” That would not be a new idea. There were already many Italian neighborhoods across the United States where you could find at least one authentic Italian coffee bar, usually run by an Italian American. The second key example from history for Schultz was Starbucks itself. Starbucks was a chain—only six stores, but still a chain. And they already had the high-quality Arabica beans that the Italian coffee bars served. Two examples from history came together in his mind as a new combination: the Italian coffee bar and the Starbucks Arabica chain. Schultz’s idea was, “Take the Italian model back to the Starbucks chain.” Note that Schultz’s second example from history— Starbucks—came from his own experience. Remember that the sixth sense of intuition comes from experience too. But Schultz was marketing director at Starbucks, so his sixth sense was all about marketing. In Milan, his idea was about what went on inside the store—selling beans versus selling drinks—and he had no sixth sense about that, because he

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Find Your Dream

had never run a store himself. So his sixth sense did not help him have the idea. If anything, it was a hindrance: he might spend his time thinking about how the Italians might market their coffee shops better, and that would leave no room for his new idea. So we might say that Schultz drew from his knowledge of Starbucks, not his experience. He knew what Starbucks did, and that was enough. His sixth sense about marketing helped him do his job better, but it did not help him come up with new ideas. When you use your sixth sense, you draw only from your own experience and repeat what you did before. But for your seventh sense, your own experience is simply one more source of examples from history to set alongside all the others you’ve taken in from everyone else. We can see this distinction between the sixth and seventh senses quite clearly in sports. Professional athletes use their sixth sense during the game. Afterward, to prepare for the next game, they use their seventh sense: they study videos of their past games and games that others played against their next opponent, looking for ideas from both. In the sixth sense you think fast, so all you have time to draw from is your own experience. In the seventh sense you think slow, so you have time to step back from your own experience and see your own examples from history as just one of many sources to draw from. This explains why Howard Schultz was the first to have his exact idea for Starbucks: combine the Italian coffee bar with an existing American Arabica chain. Plenty of Italian Americans already had the idea to open an Italian coffee bar in America, but very few Americans of any stripe worked for Arabica coffee chains. There were only two such chains at the time: Starbucks with its six stores around Seattle, and Peet’s Coffee and Tea with four stores around San Francisco.

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Find Your Dream

Of the fifty or so people who worked for these two small Arabica chains, Schultz was the only one on the trip to Milan. Schultz’s job and travels put him in contact with the right examples from history and in the right position to act on his new idea. His flash of insight—like all such sparks—was personal. The seventh sense does not just give you a new idea: it gives you a new idea for what you yourself should do. Your seventh sense can’t give you an idea for someone else. It’s only for you. Let’s turn now to Clausewitz’s second element: presence of mind. As Clausewitz puts it, you “expect the unexpected.” Presence of mind is the ability to clear away all your previous thoughts about the situation you face. In military terms, you enter the battlefield with an open mind. Let’s hear from Schultz again: Italy. That’s where I found the inspiration and vision that have driven my own life. . . . I discovered that inspiration in the spring of 1983, at a time when I wasn’t even particularly looking for it.

Schultz makes it clear: he “found” and “discovered” his inspiration and vision in Italy. He did not have them beforehand. He did not go to Italy with the aim of finding them. He wasn’t searching at all—he was happy in his current job. If you sat next to Schultz on the plane to Milan, and you asked him what his vision for his life was, he would not have answered, “Turn the Starbucks chain into Italian coffee bars.” If you asked him what his goal for his trip to Milan was, he probably would have said, “Find good housewares for Starbucks at the trade show.” But that first afternoon in the coffee bar, he cleared his mind of these thoughts. He put aside what

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he wanted to do with his life and what he planned to do in Milan. The result was presence of mind, and that prepared him for a flash of insight that gave him a new vision, a new goal. Without presence of mind to clear away his previous ideas, he never would have had his epiphany. Now we see why it took Schultz a full day in Italy for his seventh sense to give him his new idea. That first morning in Milan, when he saw so many coffee bars: “My mind started churning.” Presence of mind lets you move through all kinds of random thoughts that seem to make no sense at the time. Your mind unhooks from your current goal and searches for a new one. Schultz’s flash of insight took a day to form. His mind started churning in the morning, and in early evening the idea popped out. Sometimes it takes longer. Something starts bothering you, it nags away at the back of your mind for a week, a month, even longer. And then one day in the shower, or driving to work, or falling asleep—it hits you. You see what to do. That brings us to Clausewitz’s third element: the flash of insight itself. I’ve taught the main ideas of this book for a few years now, to thousands of people around the world, and I can’t tell you how many have come up to me and told me a similar story. One of my favorites is a doctor in a rare bone specialty who almost drove off the highway when a big idea hit him exactly as it hit Schultz in Milan. Just like Kary Mullis, the DNA scientist, it happened while driving. The doctor pulled over, screeched to a halt on the roadway shoulder, rummaged in his briefcase for a pad and pen, and scribbled down his idea as the freeway traffic roared past. The doctor explained to me the examples from history that met in his mind—I didn’t understand a word if it, of course. But he wrote up his idea as an article in a professional journal and changed his career to specialize in that.

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Find Your Dream

When the flash of insight comes, you sometimes wonder why you didn’t see it earlier. As Schultz said, “It seemed so obvious.” That’s part of why it strikes you so hard. One minute it’s not obvious at all. You’ve never thought of it. The next moment, after it hits you, it makes such complete sense that you smack your forehead for not having thought of it sooner. But of course it’s not really that obvious. You find that out as soon as you try to explain it to someone else. Most of the time, they just can’t see it. It’s not at all obvious to them. The contrast between your old ideas and the new one is black and white. “Starbucks had missed the point—completely missed it,” says Schultz. The new idea is good, the old idea is bad. This is another reason why the idea can take so long to come. It’s hard to accept that your previous idea was wrong. Giving up on that earlier idea and goal feels like failure, and in Schultz’s case it’s disloyal too: his new idea overrides the current goal that his company gave him. To follow his new idea means going back and telling his boss that the current vision and goal for Starbucks is completely wrong. Not that they should buy this or that houseware, which is why Schultz went to Milan. But they should completely transform the Starbucks business. That leads us to Clausewitz’s fourth element: resolution. That means resolve, determination, persistence. You don’t just say, “I see what to do.” You say, “I see what to do and I want to do it.” The idea lights a fire in your mind and in your heart, and this final, crucial step makes you follow through and make your idea come true. Again, the seventh sense is personal. We see the fire in Schultz from the very first moment: “It was so immediate and physical that I was shaking.” He couldn’t wait to get started. Before that moment, he had an interest in coffee. Now he has a passion. The flash of

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Find Your Dream

insight converts an interest into a passion, which fuels the resolution to carry it through. Schultz met myriad obstacles along the way and needed resolution aplenty. First of all, when he went back home and laid out his new plan, his boss said no. So instead Schultz thought about starting a separate company from Starbucks. But that was an enormous risk. He had never started a company before. Schultz came very close to giving up: I was depressed for months, paralyzed with uncertainty.

Then one weekend, playing basketball, he met Scott Greenburg. They started talking, and of course Schultz told Greenburg about his idea. He told everyone he met. Greenburg was a corporate lawyer, and he explained how Schultz could raise money to start his own company. In Greenburg’s expert opinion, it wouldn’t be hard to do. Suddenly Schultz could see a way forward. It was a secondary flash of insight to carry forward his primary one. Greenburg gave him examples from history in the form of his own expertise in other cases, and Schultz had the presence of mind to let this new element combine with his previous idea to show him a new way forward. Now Schultz had resolution again, for this new variation of his idea: This is my moment. . . . If I don’t seize the opportunity, if I don’t step out of my comfort zone and risk it all, if I let too much time tick on, my moment will pass.

Sure enough, Schultz left Starbucks to start his own company. It worked, and a few years later he bought the original Starbucks chain. But even then, parts of the idea didn’t work: for example, he gave up Italian ceramic cups for paper

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Find Your Dream

ones instead. And instead of just a bar to stand at, he added chairs, tables, and takeout. In the end, Starbucks became an American-Italian mix rather than a pure Italian coffee bar. Each time he made a change, Schultz agonized over it. When customers asked for nonfat milk in their caffè latte and cappuccino, Schultz declared: “We will never offer nonfat milk. It’s not who we are.” Because Italians used only whole milk. Of course, in the end, Schultz gave in. Schultz’s vision for Starbucks ended up so different from his original one that we might ask: Resolution for what? It’s not resolution to carry out your flash of insight exactly as it first formed in your mind. It’s resolution to take action on your idea and work out the details along the way. Sometimes those details are minor changes, and sometimes they’re major. And sometimes you hit a brick wall that you can’t get through, over, or around. It’s a dead end. Your idea didn’t work. In those cases, all you can do is stop. It doesn’t mean you abandon the idea forever, because an answer might come along later. But you only proceed when you have a new idea for what to do—like Schultz did, after he met Greenburg. For Schultz, quitting his job took courage, especially because he had just found out his wife was pregnant. And his parents had taught him to play it safe: “You have a good job. Why quit?” But on the other hand, I felt I’d been preparing for this step my entire life.

This is perhaps the ultimate statement of resolution that comes from a flash of insight. If you asked Schultz before Milan if he was preparing his whole life to start his own chain of Italian coffee bars, he would have looked at you like you were crazy. But months later, that’s exactly what he

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Find Your Dream

thinks. And it’s true. The flash of insight shows you a personal path that only you see, that fulfills in you a set of interests and desires that might never have come to your conscious mind as fully formed wishes or goals. But they were there, lurking in the back of your mind, waiting for their moment, until a flash of insight shows you what path to take. What if Schultz had never gone to Milan? Then perhaps some other new idea, some other path, at some other time, would have drawn from other desires and goals and taken him somewhere else. Or no new idea at all: he might have just gone on as his parents advised him, with a good job and a decent life for all the rest of his days. Howard Schultz went through all the steps of the seventh sense, but without knowing that he did them. He happened to have an open mind and a good eye for examples for history, and was driven enough to proceed with resolution after his seventh sense produced an epiphany. But what I hope this book will help you do is take these steps more deliberately, so that you can develop your seventh sense and improve your chances of having an epiphany yourself. Schultz lucked into it, but you don’t have to. You can practice and learn. You can’t predict where the seventh sense will take you, and you can’t ensure it will strike you at all. We know how the seventh sense works, but how will it work out for you, exactly? That remains a mystery, a great adventure awaiting you in the unforeseen realm of your future. But the more you prepare for it, the greater your chance of finding out.

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3

Examples from History Indian Men and English Women

the next four chapters will each consider one of the four elements of the seventh sense. Each element seems simple enough in theory. But as Clausewitz tells us: “Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.” Knowing about these elements is one thing. Mastering them is something else. The first, examples from history, seems especially simple at first. An example from history is what someone did to achieve something in the past. Take the coffee bars in Milan, for instance. Schultz recognized these as examples of successful businesses built around coffee. Instead of just selling beans, like Starbucks, they were serving prepared drinks. Here is what he noticed first: The barista moved so gracefully that it looked as though he were grinding coffee beans, pulling shots of espresso, and steaming milk at the same time, all the while conversing merrily with his customers. It was great theater.

Examples from History

Schultz first notices the barista, then studies the other pieces in turn: the espresso machine, the Italian drinks, the opera playing, the ceramic cups, the downtown location, the stand-up bar. Breaking this example from history into parts helped it feed into his flash of insight. After all, you can never use a simple example from history whole cloth—otherwise, it wouldn’t be a new idea. If you apply an example from history in the exact same situation that the original example came from, you’re just copying. Imagine, for instance, if Schultz had decided just to move to Milan and start a café of his own. An idea, but not a new idea. In the flash of insight that comes through the seventh sense, you use only the part of the original example that is relevant to the new situation. That means you must take in an example from history not as a whole, but as pieces. You note that in a certain situation someone did A, B, C, and D, and it worked, and in a related situation someone did E, F, G, and H, and it worked. You then encounter a new situation that reminds you of both, and your memory serves up B and G—that is, two parts of two different examples from history—and your brain combines them in a flash of insight. Sure enough, Schultz took in the Italian coffee bar as an example from history made up of several parts, and understood Starbucks as an example from history made up of other parts. This discipline, of seeing and considering what was happening around him, made his flash of insight possible. Someone else might have entered the same coffee bar and simply enjoyed the experience, without studying what made it work. From Schultz’s book we get the impression that it’s a habit for him: he studies the success stories and achievements he sees wherever he goes. It’s a habit that you can learn too. As with any habit, the more you do it, the easier it gets. For example, you can practice when reading newspapers

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Examples from History

or magazines. Look for articles that explain how someone achieved something, and when you find one, try to work through exactly what that person did to succeed. It doesn’t matter if they’re working in an area that you don’t know much about. Some of the best ideas take elements from far and wide. One of the most famous examples is Henry Ford: he got the idea for the moving assembly line for cars from the overhead rack of a slaughterhouse. The animal moves from station to station, while the workers stand still at each station. So Ford moved his cars on a rail through the factory to do the same thing. You can also practice at meetings or at parties, or whenever you meet someone new. Ask them what their biggest achievement is, and then ask them to explain in detail how they accomplished it. If you’re somewhat shy, this technique has the added advantage of being an instant ice breaker. Other people are usually glad to talk about themselves, and will be flattered that you think the details of what they did are worthwhile to know. You can also use the Internet to help you find good examples from history. Google searches on “what works,” or “success stories,” or “how to” for any subject can lead to a wealth of useful detail. They can also lead nowhere, without any real examples from history. Take a common example: losing weight. Many people who want to lose weight are constantly searching for the right idea for how to do it, switching from one diet craze to another. There’s a vast array to choose from: the Wikipedia entry on “Diets” lists over a hundred. Which one is right for you? If you look for examples of successful weight loss online, you can find at least one person for each diet who says it worked for them. You can also find one person who tells you it didn’t work. So no answer there. You could hone your

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Examples from History

search by looking for examples close to your own situation: your weight, height, age, male or female, food preferences, health, level of exercise, income, job—all of these factors might change which diet works best for you. But you still find the same result: someone your age and height and level of exercise tells you that diet X worked for them, and someone else similar says diet Y. And then you find similar people who tell you X didn’t work for them at all. Neither did Y. In this case, examples from history of diets that work yield nothing but confusion. Each diet works, and it doesn’t work, and you can’t judge which one is best for you. So what do you do? The answer comes from presence of mind, which we’ll look at more closely in the next chapter. You have to switch goals. “Find the best diet” is the wrong goal. As you study successful examples from history, you will encounter one common strand: all diets work if you keep to them. The diet fails not because of the diet itself, but because you stop doing it. It’s hard to keep to a diet: you struggle on for a week, a month, a year, and then you give up the struggle. You go off the diet and re-gain the weight. Then you search for another diet. So examples from history can help you find an answer if you have the presence of mind to allow your goal to change. Successful diet examples show you that willpower, not the diet itself, is the key to losing weight. With this new understanding, you can now go looking for a new set of examples from history—in this case, examples of what exactly someone did to maintain the willpower to keep to a diet. That means changing your everyday habits, and you will find with more digging that the best way to change a bad habit is to develop a new one. So who has used what techniques, to develop what new habits, that would help you eat less and exercise more? Now you have a harder search, as it’s far more

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Examples from History

personal than which diet plan you followed. Most accounts of losing weight leave it out. But at least now you’re searching for the right thing. Of course, the seventh sense can’t solve every problem. And you don’t know what problem it can solve until the flash of insight comes. Like Schultz: he wasn’t trying to solve the problem of making Italian-style coffee bars popular in the United States, and he didn’t know he could solve it before he saw how in Milan. But if you are faced with a problem, searching for examples from history gives you—and your seventh sense—at least a chance to solve it. When I teach about examples from history, I often get this question: In the flood of information we’re exposed to everyday, how can we possibly remember all the examples from history we encounter? This question comes from the misunderstanding that “information” and “examples from history” are one in the same. Remember that an example from history is a very specific kind of information. It tells you how someone achieved something. Most information does not do that. When you come across an example from history, pay attention to all the details. That will fix it in your memory. If you let other information flow in and out of your mind and only retain the examples from history, this will greatly reduce what you put on the shelves of your brain to remember. I get another question too, and this one is harder to answer: How do you know what’s true? When you study an example from history, perhaps the account you read is biased, or just plain wrong. That person you meet at the party might be spinning a wonderful fantasy. While it can sometimes be impossible to know for certain, there are ways to check your examples for accuracy. One way is “triangulation.” This term comes from navigation and land surveying, where you take measurements

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Examples from History

from two points that allow you to determine a third point. In social science research, triangulation means you look for more than one source that gives similar results. So if you identify a good example from history, see if you can find different accounts from different sources that tell a similar tale. And especially look for evidence that the elements actually work. So an example of “using willpower to stick to a diet” must tell you how much weight the person lost, whether this weight loss was permanent, and the details of how they lost it. Schultz made sure that the Italian coffee bar “worked” by walking around different neighborhoods of Milan to make sure that he saw the same thing in each one. And he did. He even took a morning to go to Verona, a medieval tourist town forty minutes by train from Milan. There he saw the same kind and same density of coffee bars as in Milan. Of course, this kind of triangulation can’t work as well for a personal account that someone tells you directly. In this case, two things can help you judge whether the story is true: details and humility. If the person can give you the blowby-blow of how they achieved something, it’s likely true. They probably could not make up such a complete account on the spur of the moment just for you. But beware if they give you a heroic account—a tale of genius and superhuman effort. They may be exaggerating their success and their story. Schultz’s description is the opposite: he calls his idea “obvious,” not brilliant. If anything, he kicks himself for not seeing it even sooner. And he makes perfectly clear that the idea came from examples of what other people did rather than his own imagination. He’s honest about all the obstacles too, and most of the time it’s someone else—like Greenburg on the basketball court—who solves the problem he faces. But while you can check examples for basic accuracy, you cannot avoid bias completely. Every account of every

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Examples from History

example from history comes with a bias. There are actually very few objective facts about the past because everyone comes to them from their own perspective. Take, for instance, the Great Depression of the 1930s. How did the United States recover? One answer is President Roosevelt’s New Deal, which created more than thirty new laws and agencies to help the country bounce back. You can cite the facts about those laws and agencies: when they came into existence, what actions they led to, what money they spent. But the ultimate question is: Did they work? Is the New Deal a good example from history when it comes to economic recovery? Some detailed histories of the New Deal show that it brought the country back from the brink. Other accounts show that the New Deal only made things worse, and that it was actually World War II that solved the problem. Are these authors biased? Of course they are, and not always in obvious ways. Roosevelt was a Democrat, but you can find Democratic scholars who show that the New Deal was a mistake. And Republicans who show that it worked. Luckily, few problems you face today are as big and complex as the Great Depression. So unless you aim for a high position in economic policy, you don’t need to study the entire New Deal as an example from history. But you might want to study parts of it, for other reasons. If you need to do marketing someday, Roosevelt might be a good example from history: perhaps he used clever marketing techniques to succeed in selling his New Deal to the country. It might be worthwhile to dig deeper to find out what exactly he did. A third good question I often get is whether you should also study examples that failed. There are two different answers. If you have lots and lots of time, the answer is yes. Go ahead and study failure too. If you don’t have lots of time, then no. Search instead for examples of success.

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Examples from History

This answer may be surprising, given the common wisdom that you learn most from failure. But while failures are certainly memorable—especially your own—“memorable” is not always “useful.” Examples from history that failed are only useful when you’re faced with another, very similar case. For intuition—the sixth sense—that’s very important. You must study what can go wrong as well as what can go right. For example, a music teacher might show you the most common mistakes in playing a certain piece. The teacher won’t show you all the ways to do it wrong—that would take years, and most of them would not be useful for you. But studying common pitfalls is a normal part of learning for deep expertise in any domain. For the seventh sense, failure is far less useful. The Milan coffee bars struck Schultz as worthwhile precisely because they worked. You look for positive examples from history to combine, not negative ones. After you get your idea and start to take action, you want to develop a sixth sense in your new domain. Once Schultz opened his Starbucks coffee bars, he paid close attention to failure as well as success. He wanted to know what worked best, to spread it to other stores, and what didn’t work, so he could fix it and also prevent other stores in the chain from making the same mistake. But that’s the sixth sense, not the seventh. So when you’re looking for examples from history, you want to identify success, study its details, triangulate, and watch out for sources of bias. These steps are not always easy, especially when it comes to personal strategy. There are countless case studies, articles, and reports that announce and dissect business success, but there are far fewer sources that provide detailed accounts of solving personal problems. And when you do find examples of success in personal matters, the facts of what happened often come wrapped in a fog of emotion. It can

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Examples from History

be hard to sort out all the forces in a person’s life that affect the outcome: they did A, and the result was B, but their situation is so different from yours that you can’t predict whether A for you will lead to B too. This makes the search harder, and demands even greater presence of mind, where you consider everything you hear, everything you see, everything you read as a possible source for examples from history that might apply to your own life. A key example might just appear when and where—and from whom—you least expect it. A little-known chapter of a very famous life shows just how fruitful such unexpected examples can be. The time is the early 1900s. The place is South Africa. The country is still part of the British Empire, although Dutch settlers fight for and win local control in half the country. The Dutch call themselves Afrikaners, and they aim to put in place racial laws that later become known as “apartheid.” There are Indian immigrants in the country too, and they form an “Indian Congress” to oppose these racial laws. Their method is lawful and polite: they put together delegations of prominent Indians to ask the British authorities to grant them full and equal rights. They copied this method from India, also part of the British Empire, where Indians were second-class citizens in their own country. In 1906, the South African Indians send the secretary of their organization to London to lobby the British authorities directly. He is thirty-seven years old, small, quiet, and shy. He wears a proper English lawyer suit. He was born in India. He failed as a lawyer there, moved to South Africa, and failed as a lawyer there too. The South African Indians pay him just enough to live on. His name is Mohandas Gandhi. When he arrives in London, he finds the country in an uproar over the tactics of Emmeline Pankhurst, the English

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Examples from History

suffragette. For years English women had used the same method as the Indians in South Africa and India: polite delegations to ask the authorities for their rights. Then Pankhurst broke away to form a new organization with a different idea that she took directly from the labor movement: illegal marches, demonstrations, parades, and picketing. You get arrested, and you go to jail in droves. The labor movement had such success in Britain that in 1906 it formed its own Labour Party, with twenty-nine Members of Parliament elected. Pankhurst started to use the same tactics, and she started to win, as British officials one by one declared their support for female suffrage, including Winston Churchill. Gandhi sees the light. It changes his life. Back in South Africa, he writes in his local Indian newspaper: When Women Are Manly, Will Men Be Effeminate? A few days ago a procession of eight hundred women marched to the Houses of Parliament. When the police stopped the crowd, some brave women tried to force their way into the House. . . . The Magistrate sentenced them . . . and each one of them, instead of paying up the pittance of a fine, has courted imprisonment.  .  .  . We believe that these women have behaved in a manly way. Now let us look at our own house.  .  .  . Will Indians go to gaol  .  .  . ?  .  .  . Hence we ask: will Indian men be effeminate? Or will they emulate the manliness shown by the English women and wake up? Brave Women of Britain.  .  .  . All of them go to gaol instead of paying fines. . . . We have to follow the example of the women referred to above. We earnestly request all our readers to have this article imprinted on their minds. Women in England have surpassed all expectations. . . . Indians have to fight with the same spirit.

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Examples from History

An example from history leads Gandhi to change his strategy. He brings Mrs. Pankhurst’s passive resistance back to the Indian organization in South Africa, just as Schultz combined the Italian coffee bar with the Starbucks chain. After ten years of struggle in South Africa, Gandhi returned to India to take the same idea to the Indian National Congress, and became its leader in 1924. Of course his flash of insight in London was not the whole story: as with Schultz, there were years of further refinement, ups and downs and twists and turns. But once again, there would not even be a story if not for Gandhi’s seventh sense. Before his big idea, you would not have picked him out of a crowd. After, he became the most famous person on earth. And his methods became a model—an example from history all its own—for other leaders and movements in their own struggles, most famously Martin Luther King, Jr. and American civil rights. We see too from Gandhi’s story the importance of presence of mind: he kept his mind open to all that went on around him, not only what fit his goal. His employers sent him to London to lobby on their behalf, not to observe the success of other social movements. And his first message about his new idea makes it clear that English women were one of the last places Indian men—like himself—would look for inspiration. It took tremendous presence of mind for Gandhi to let such an example from history change his goal so dramatically. And that’s the subject of our next chapter, the second component of the seventh sense: presence of mind.

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4

Presence of Mind Your City of Light

in our Schultz example especially, we can see that presence of mind comes into play at all three stages of the seventh sense. First, before the flash of insight: it opened Schultz’s mind to examples from history of all kinds, not just those that fit his current goal. Second, during the flash of insight: presence of mind allowed him to set a new goal from a new combination of examples from history. Third, after the flash of insight: he continued to take in new examples from history and adjusted his idea along the way. In all three steps, presence of mind means you clear away your prior ideas about the situation you face: what the problem is, what the solution is, what your goal is, what the question is, what the answer is, what you want, what you expect, what you like or dislike. You free your mind. That gives your brain the space and time to make its own connections. Presence of mind is difficult to foster, and it takes mental discipline to achieve. But it is crucial for creating good ideas—and it can make you happier and healthier too.

Presence of Mind

Picture an old-fashioned telephone exchange, where the operator wears a headset and plugs and unplugs telephone lines into the holes of a big board. In presence of mind, you unplug the whole board. Then your brain takes over and replugs a new set of lines in a new set of holes. That’s how you get a new idea. Presence of mind is an element of both the sixth and the seventh sense. In the sixth sense, your presence of mind lasts only a moment. You disconnect your thoughts and right away a familiar idea from your own experience jumps to the fore. This is the common understanding of presence of mind: having a calm and ready reaction to an unexpected situation. In the seventh sense, presence of mind must last much longer, and again and again at all three stages: to take in examples from history, to allow these examples from history to combine into a flash of insight, and to adapt your idea once you’ve had it. In the sixth sense, presence of mind gives you a familiar reaction to an unexpected situation. In the seventh sense, it gives you a new reaction, and that takes your brain much longer to do. Look at how presence of mind worked for Schultz in Milan. First, before his flash of insight: his goal in Milan was the housewares show, but he stayed open, observant, and interested in what went on around him, even if it had nothing to do with housewares. That allowed him to notice and study the example from history of Italian coffee bars. Second, during his flash of insight: presence of mind let a new combination of examples from history form in his mind to reach a new goal. Let’s slow down to work out exactly what your brain does during these steps. It’s like a shopping trip without a list: you wander the aisles of a supermarket looking for what to make

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Presence of Mind

for dinner. Your eyes move along the shelves, and at some items you stop to look more closely. Some of those items you pick up and look at longer. Some you put back on the shelf, and some you drop in your cart. Then farther along you put something else in, and take something out and put it back. As you go up and down the aisles, the contents of your cart keep changing. At some point, you see that you have a complete meal for dinner. That’s it: you have your idea. You go to the checkout counter. The items in the supermarket are examples from history, and your presence of mind guides you throughout the trip. In this case, your goal did not change: you wanted to make dinner, and now you have what you need to accomplish this. But presence of mind means you are open to changing your goal, even if you don’t end up changing it. Let’s say two family members who are both very picky eaters are spending the night with you. You can’t decide what to make that both will like. As you go up and down the aisles of the supermarket, the contents of your cart keep changing, but each time you look at the combination and know that your guests will not be happy with the dinner it will make. As it takes longer and longer to fulfill your goal—of making a dinner your picky guests will like—presence of mind allows you to let go of this goal and remain open to other possible goals. Then you pass the egg case, and remember that both of your picky eaters love a big breakfast. “Breakfast” pops into your mind as a way to reach the wider goal of pleasing your guests. So you switch your goal: you put back all the dinner ingredients and assemble breakfast instead. You take your guests out for dinner tonight and make them a big breakfast the following morning. In this case, your goal did change. Your presence of mind was the same, but the situation was different.

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Presence of Mind

Presence of mind means that your goal can change, or not, depending on your situation and what examples from history you find. In the second shopping case, your new idea changed your goal from dinner to breakfast. But it did not change your goal completely: you kept the overall goal of trying to please your guests. We could even make a third case, where your guests are just impossible to please, even at breakfast, and in the end you change even that overall goal—you stop trying to please them—and make a dinner that pleases you. In all cases, the greater your presence of mind, the wider the range of possible goals you might see a way to achieve. The result might shift you a little, from dinner to breakfast. Or it might shift you a lot, from pleasing your guests to pleasing yourself. Letting go of your goal in the first place is key to presence of mind for the seventh sense. Like a boat on a lake: you pull up the anchor and drift wherever your thoughts might take you. When you get an idea, you put down your anchor again. You might end up close to where you started, meaning your goal doesn’t change, or you might be very far away. Even then, you can always decide to sail back to where you started, to your original goal. But presence of mind lets you wander wherever your thoughts might take you. A change of goals was key for Schultz. In his flash of insight, he switched his specific goal from “do well in my current job” to “turn Starbucks into a chain of Italian coffee bars.” Or take Gandhi: in London his specific goal changed from “persuade as many high British officials as possible,” to “passive resistance by masses of Indians.” But they also had more general goals that did not change. Schultz wanted to succeed in the coffee business, and Gandhi wanted to win political and civil rights for Indians. Those wider goals stayed the same.

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Presence of Mind

The interplay of multiple goals greatly complicates presence of mind. Think of yourself: if you list your goals at any one moment, the list is likely long. The list might include: get lunch, learn Chinese, find a spouse, help your children thrive, succeed at work, find a new job, stay healthy, plan a vacation, buy shoes, impress your boss, complete two important projects, and so on. Of course you won’t take action on more than one or two of these goals at a time. But they’re always there behind the scenes. Presence of mind means you are open to changing any one of these goals, or seeing a new way to achieve it, if a flash of insight comes to light the way. But what happens to all your other goals when you suddenly have a new idea about one of them, or have a new idea that creates a new goal altogether? Do you give up on other goals and take up the new one? Sometimes, of course, you can pursue multiple goals at the same time—to succeed at work and also impress your boss. But what if goals conflict—for example, if a new job takes too much time from your kids? With presence of mind, your answer to these questions is always the same: you can’t know beforehand. Perfect presence of mind means you are open to changing any and all of your goals. Then comes the flash of insight. Now you have an idea, and you see what goal it leads to and how that compares to all your previous goals. Trying to prejudge which goals you are willing to change or not can be a major obstacle to presence of mind. Raise your anchor and let yourself drift. This may be a scary thought, and at first you might feel lost, unmoored, with nothing at all to hold on to. But the reward, if you succeed, with be a new idea for a new way forward. After your flash of insight, you will likely drift among different subgoals, rather than to a different goal entirely. In

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Presence of Mind

order to benefit from Greenburg’s advice, Schultz had to give up his subgoal of convincing Starbucks to act on his idea. It’s no surprise that he did that only when he saw a path to a new subgoal: start his own company. His overall goal of a chain of Italian coffee bars in American did not change. Presence of mind continued to help him find each new piece of the puzzle. Gandhi did the same: new pieces of the puzzle helped him set and achieve subgoals to advance his overall goal. His overall goal was for South African Indians to apply the techniques of nonviolent civil disobedience from English women’s suffrage. But how to do that exactly? He wisely saw that the two situations were different enough that he needed more elements to combine. For example, the English women were a homogeneous group: middle class, educated, English speakers, almost all of the same religion, and of course, all women. Indians in South Africa were rich and poor, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian, literate and illiterate, male and female, merchants and laborers. They spoke various Indian languages, and the Hindus were further divided by caste, with Untouchables at the very bottom. How could Gandhi bring them all together? The solution came from presence of mind. Instead of doing exactly what Pankhurst did, Gandhi opened his mind again and saw another example from history to use. This one came from Russia: after completing his great novels, Leo Tolstoy turned his family estate into a classless society. His followers set up Tolstoyan communes to follow his principles of perfect equality among all people, where all could live and work together. So Gandhi set one up in South Africa. He called it “Tolstoy Farm.” Gandhi moved there to live. There he gave up his lawyer suits for simple Indian clothes, again like Tolstoy, who dressed like a Russian peasant on his estate.

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Presence of Mind

When Gandhi moved back to India, he set up the same thing there but gave it an Indian name: “ashram,” which Indians recognized as the site where a holy man lives and gives instruction to others. At that point Gandhi started dressing even more simply, in bolts of white cloth like a Hindu holy man—yet another example from history that all Indians knew quite well. Presence of mind means that all the elements of your idea are open to alteration, all the time. You ask yourself every morning: Is there something I need to add, subtract, or change? The answer is probably no. But if you don’t ask, you’ll miss that rare time when the answer is yes. Changing your idea every day is bad—you’ll never get anywhere. But staying open every day to changing your idea—that’s essential to presence of mind. Here’s a recent example of presence of mind and how it can help you stay alert to examples from history from far afield. Kobe Bryant, one of the most successful basketball players of all time, told this story in an interview in September 2014 in the New York Times. He spoke about his fadeaway shot, where you jump up and backward, away from your opponent in front of you. The usual way to do it is to jump with both legs together, so your body is perfectly straight, leaning back. Bryant explained: When you watch me shoot my fadeaway jumper, you’ll notice my leg is always extended. I had problems making that shot in the past. It’s tough. So one day I’m watching the Discovery Channel and see a cheetah hunting. When the cheetah runs, its tail always gives it balance, even if it’s cutting a sharp angle. And that’s when I was like: My leg could be the tail, right? Inspiration surrounds us.

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What amazing presence of mind. He was watching a nature program to relax, not for research. But relaxing helped, so his mind was free and open. Bryant saw the cheetah using its tail for balance  when cutting left or right,  and  applied that to his own movement in a different direction: backward. And this example highlights again the difference between the sixth sense and the seventh. Professional athletes like Bryant have tremendous intuition from long hours of practice and many, many games played. His sixth sense helps him do the same move better next time. But only his seventh sense can give him a new move. Presence of mind is hard to achieve and sustain, so you can’t expect other people to have it. When you tell someone else your new idea, the most common reaction is for them to tell you their own ideas on the topic. That’s because everyone puts a tremendous amount of conscious and unconscious thought into their own ideas. Think of it this way: someone has worked long and hard on building a house. You come along and say you’re going to knock down their house and build them a better one. How do they react? They defend their house. They tell you it’s better than the one you aim to build. They don’t want to admit that all their hard work has gone to waste. And you’re not just criticizing their house, you’re criticizing them: you’re telling them they don’t know how to build a good house. The mistake here is simple but deep: people take their ideas personally. If my idea is not worthy, then I’m not worthy. Especially at work, and especially if I’m the boss: the company promoted me because I’m an expert. I know the right answers. If someone else comes up with a different idea, and it’s right, then I don’t deserve to be boss. Especially if that person reports to me. Then they deserve to be boss instead. But that can’t be right. So their idea can’t be right.

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Alas, the success of your idea usually depends on others having the presence of mind to consider that your idea might be better than theirs. While you can’t control other people’s presence of mind, you can communicate your idea in a way that appeals to their presence of mind. For example, if you say “Here’s my idea for what we should do,” you’re encouraging an automatic response. You’re setting up “your” idea as better than other ideas. The person you’re talking to will automatically compare your idea to their own idea, and will likely react by defending their own idea as better. You can help avoid this knee-jerk reaction by demonstrating your own presence of mind. Reconstruct how you got the idea: “Something struck me last night . . .” And then you tell what struck you, in the same sequence that the thoughts came to you. Presence of mind let your brain make connections. Things struck you. Explain what struck you, and what connected in your mind. That’s the best way to convey your seventh sense to others—so that their brains can put it together too. It won’t guarantee they agree, but at least they’ll be able to see it. And that’s an excellent start. Presenting an idea this way makes it less about “my idea” versus “your idea,” and more about “this idea” versus “that idea.” Especially in situations where you really do need a new idea, experts tend to defend their previous ideas. They have a sixth sense that’s very helpful in situations that have happened before, but in a new situation, you need a new idea. You need the seventh sense. And for that, everyone is equal. In 1915, after twenty years in South Africa, Gandhi returned to India. At that point, he was a newcomer to the Indian national movement. For those previous twenty years, a whole generation of leaders had toiled away in India.

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They were “experts” in the Indian independence movement. But rather than clinging to their previous ideas, many of them switched to Gandhi’s new idea—including his two greatest allies, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel, who became independent India’s first prime minister and deputy prime minister. They had the presence of mind, and the humility, to accept someone else’s idea. Detaching the idea from the person who had it means that there is no such thing as a good strategist. There are only good strategies. It’s the idea that counts, not who had it. Someone can have a good idea one day and a bad one the next: for example, Steve Jobs. He combined two examples from history to make his breakthrough Macintosh computer: the small, cheap, easy-to-use Apple II that his partner, Steve Wozniak, built, plus the graphical user interface and mouse that he saw on a big, expensive Xerox machine. Right afterward, he left Apple and spent ten years trying to build a perfect computer from scratch, which failed terribly. He returned to Apple and went back to combining examples from history, and that’s when everything took off: under Jobs, Apple became the world’s most successful company by creative combination of breakthroughs that others made. A creative person is happy to be wrong and for someone else to be right: it means you found a better idea. You’re perfectly willing to tear down your house and put up a better one. When you take your ideas personally, you’re unhappy to be wrong: and that unhappiness comes out as a host of negative emotions, such as anger, jealousy, selfdoubt, or regret. You’re angry that other people did not just trust your judgment. You’re jealous of the person who had the better idea. You doubt your self-worth, that you’re not a creative person. Or you regret that you didn’t have a better idea.

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These negative emotions are all obstacles to presence of mind. They prevent you from letting go of your previous idea to open your mind to other ideas. You make arguments to defend your previous idea, but these emotions are the real reason for your stubbornness. And you don’t want to admit this, because you know you’re supposed to use “reason” rather than “emotion” to judge ideas. But not all emotions are bad—positive emotions can be extremely powerful. Schultz and Gandhi were both excited by their discoveries. Gandhi was certainly motivated by love of humanity when he leapt at Emmeline Pankhurst’s idea of passive resistance. And Schultz declares that the “romance of Italy” was a big part of his new idea for Starbucks. Emotions can be very good indeed. In a later chapter we will learn techniques to increase and practice presence of mind, especially in overcoming the negative emotions that get in the way. For now, we’ll conclude with an example of how positive emotion can help. One of the most positive emotions you can have is an overall feeling of well-being: content, relaxed, and at peace with the world. It’s the perfect setting for presence of mind. You enter a realm where your mind is calm, all is clear and bright. That was the state that a senior executive Joan Affleck was in when she had the flash of insight that changed her life. She sent me this story after taking one of my classes. How fitting that it took place in Paris—the “City of Light.”

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CRUISE on the Seine By Joan Affleck June 2013 background I work for Sanofi U.S., a top global pharmaceutical company, with a market value of $93 billion and an R+D budget of $4 billion. As head of the Clinical Documentation Department, I am responsible for all the documentation for clinical R+D, both to inform users and to meet the requirements of health authorities like the Food and Drug Administration, the European Medicines Agency, and other regional or national agencies. Our products span myriad therapeutic areas, from primary care such as insomnia and high cholesterol to genetically linked cancers and other rare diseases. We prepare a series of documents for each stage of a product’s life cycle, from laboratory research to post-marketing safety reporting on patients who take a specific prescribed treatment for a disease. Much of what we write about a product is used over and over again across documents. In some cases we have to use exactly the same terminology, and other times we need to make modifications—sometimes the tense of a verb, sometimes new data reporting, sometimes the importance of a finding over time. We must be thorough and meticulous: our mistakes can be costly, when we have to recall and redo a huge number of documents—or dangerous, if they lead medical staff or patients to make mistakes too. flash of insight I work in New York and travel often to our headquarters in Paris. On one such trip I arranged to meet a friend of the family who had just moved there for a year. We knew nothing about each other’s work as we sat down at a sidewalk café to enjoy a glass of wine and the long summer sunlight along the

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Seine. After a busy day at the office, I was happy to let my new acquaintance fill me in on her adventure of settling in to Paris and on her career. Imagine my surprise when she began telling me about a recent chapter of her career with the U.S. Navy, when she had developed a system for identifying and cataloging content from contract negotiations with a multitude of diverse vendors for reference and reuse by the military. As she described the tagging of content segments with a technical markup language that allowed encoding of information for reuse and for delivery in a prescribed format, I saw in my mind’s eye beams of light, representing the clinical content of my own work environment, flowing from one destination to another within an initial sphere of activity and then shooting out to other locations, joining with other beams and moving on. It was a mega-map of clinical content showing how it could be identified and shared for research and development in the service of solutions for unmet patient needs. My flash of insight in the City of Light changed my conception of my mission as head of the department. I wanted to be the first to bring the same kind of disciplined repurposing of content to the pharmaceutical world. I plunged into months of my own research. It turned out that there was plenty of history to learn from: the military, aerospace, finance, and IT sectors had been using Structured Content Management— SCM—for years. And I followed a spiral of links to more and more detailed information and personal connections until I found like-minded people in my industry, including a few in Sanofi itself. Suddenly it seemed there was a path opening up before me. progress and recognition After several months working with a few like-minded associates to gather information, map possible pilot projects, and estimate budgets and achievable benefits, I put together a preliminary proposal to launch CRUISE: Content Re-Use Information System for Electronic Documents. It went up

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the chain of command, and in December 2010 we had initial approval for a two-phase budget of $4 million. By April 2011 the first of the money came through and we initiated partnerships with two strong and innovative developers, DITA Exchange and the ArborSys Group. In just three months we had a working model. For our first application, we thought we should start with a small pilot. But then I noticed that in our normal pipeline we had one huge project coming up that required more than 4,000 separate documents to deliver quickly on an inflexible timeline. The documents were individual patient stories or narratives that compiled information from various databases and required clinical judgment. The estimated time requirement for each narrative was 6 hours, and the cost for the project was $2.4 million. Dozens of people would have to work on the task to meet the deadlines with the standard process. We took the risk of piloting CRUISE instead. Our preliminary results indicate that we have cut the production time for each narrative from 6 hours to 6 minutes, and the total cost of the project from $2.4 million to $36,000. With content reused directly from the quality-controlled databases into structured maps for the content, we have been able to better insure quality and eliminate a second quality check of the story text. CRUISE has been recognized in the pharmaceutical industry for achieving the first steps of efficiency in documentation that many people have dreamed of for years. Within Sanofi we are already piloting aspects of CRUISE with other departments that produce documents. Our second-step funding was confirmed. An industry working group has started under our sponsorship to encourage the use of SCM so that research information can be more easily shared across companies and aggregated for the benefit of patients. And in 2012, CRUISE won a Microsoft Life Sciences Innovation Award. That evening in Paris, I was so excited because I saw what I wanted to do not just for a new project, but for the rest of my career. Three years into it, I can say this: so far, so good!

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5

Flash of Insight Magical Science

the third element of the seventh sense—the flash of insight—has always been the most mysterious. It’s the moment when the first two elements—examples from history and presence of mind—come together in a creative spark. Then comes the fourth element, resolution. In later chapters I provide some techniques to help you improve the other three elements—but science still knows the least about the flash of insight itself. Yet some scientists are getting closer. In recent years, new technology has made it possible to look inside the human brain while you are awake and thinking. MRI, CAT, NMR, PET, MEG—these are different kinds of brain scans. A scientist hooks you up to the scan, then gives you a specific thinking task, and watches what happens in your brain. By changing the experiment, you can study different types of thought. For example, at my own university, Elke Weber uses brain scans to study environmental thinking. She recently took her

Flash of Insight

research to a conference that the Dalai Lama hosted at his headquarters in Dharamsala, India. The Dalai Lama is the head of Tibetan Buddhism, and he has a special project to understand why people do or do not want to protect the environment, as a deep feeling of connection to the earth is part of his Buddhist philosophy. One of Weber’s studies measured two kinds of thinking that contribute to environmental damage: valuing immediate consumption more than savings, and a lack of self-control to consume less even when you want to. Sure enough, scans show that these are two very different kinds of thought that produce very different effects in the brain. The neuroscientists John Kounios and Mark Jung-Beeman have gone farthest in the use of brain scans to study flashes of insight. Their new book, The Eureka Factor, reports on their latest experiments. They gave subjects a series of puzzles and watched how they solved them on brain scans. If you used some kind of conscious thinking, they called that “analysis.” If you just saw the answer suddenly, they called that “insight.” Sure enough, these two different kinds of thinking showed up as two different patterns in brain scans. The “insight” scans showed a calm brain before the answer, and then a jump in brain activity the moment the answer arrived. This is strong evidence of both presence of mind and flashes of insight. Unfortunately, we do not know whether they captured the seventh sense or the sixth. Let’s take a closer look at their experiments to see why. The puzzles they used were word problems of “remote association.” They give you three words: for example, crab, pine, and sauce. These three words are remote, meaning that they are not related to each other. Then they tell you to make an association: that is, to come up with a fourth word that goes with all three. You get fifteen seconds. In this case,

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the answer is apple, which makes crabapple, pineapple, and applesauce. Puzzle solved. Kounios and Jung-Beeman call it “insight” if apple suddenly pops into your head. An example of “analysis” would be listing all the crabs you can—crab walk, crabcake, crab legs—and then trying to fit each one to pine and sauce. The brain scans showed that the analysis group stayed in a focused state both before and during the puzzle. For the insight group, the brain started out in a relaxed state, and then the scan showed a pulse when the insight came. These are important results for three reasons. First, they confirm that insight is a real phenomenon that science can identify and study. Second, analysis and insight show up on scans as two different brain functions. Third, insight happens in a relaxed brain—otherwise known as presence of mind. These are key advances in neuroscience. Other experiments by other scientists confirm each of these three points: Kounios and Jung-Beeman were the first to put the three together. Yet these three points apply to the sixth sense as well as the seventh, and the experiments themselves seem more suited to the sixth. If you’ve never heard of crabapples, you won’t solve the puzzle at all. If you were out walking yesterday and saw crabapple trees, the word crabapple will come to you faster. Same thing with pineapple, if you had some for breakfast. Or applesauce for lunch. If it’s been years since you heard any of these words, the answer won’t come to you quickly. The more recently you’ve heard these words, and the more you’ve heard them, the more likely you are to be able to solve the puzzle by insight. We can recognize this form of insight as the sixth sense: rapid retrieval from personal experience. Let’s compare these experiments to Schultz in the Milan coffee bar. We can see two big differences between his flash of insight and the insight that Kounios and Beeman captured.

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First, it took Shultz all day for his insight to form—not fifteen seconds, as in the experiments. Second, Schultz solved a puzzle he was not even working on. Nobody asked him to figure out how to make Arabica coffee more popular in the United States, or to come up with a new business idea, or anything. He was just sipping, watching, thinking, and the idea popped into his head. This is not a criticism of Kounios and Jung-Beeman. They went further than anyone else in studying insight, as far as current science can take them. For now, it’s impossible to capture the seventh sense in a scientific experiment. You would need a portable brain scan tracking someone morning, noon, and night for days, or even months, and in the end you still might not get a flash of insight to study. You can’t force it, and you can’t predict it. It’s possible that presence of mind and sudden insight, just as Kounios and Jung-Beeman describe them, are the same for both the sixth sense and the seventh sense. But the truth is we still don’t know. This distinction between the sixth and seventh sense can help us sort out what studies on insight actually measure. For example, Kounios and Beeman say: because insight involves a conceptual reorganization that results in new, non-obvious interpretation, it is often identified as a form of creativity.

This is a very traditional definition of creativity that predates Kandel’s work on learning and memory. From what we now know about the seventh sense, a creative idea is neither “obvious” nor “non-obvious”: it’s all in the eye of the beholder. If an idea is “obvious” to you, that means you have seen it before in some form. If it’s “non-obvious,” it’s new to you. So an idea can be obvious to one person and

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non-obvious to someone else. And remember what Schultz thought right after his flash of insight: “It seemed so obvious.” A flash of insight reveals an obvious answer, not a nonobvious one. It seems non-obvious to others because they haven’t put it together yet. But it’s obvious to you. In their experiment, Kounios and Jung-Beeman expected analysis to give a noncreative “obvious” answer. And they expected insight to give a creative “non-obvious” answer. But in reality, both analysis and insight gave the same answer: apple. So analysis and intuition were equally creative—or noncreative. In any event, we know that the seventh sense would give a creative answer of a very different kind: for example, you see a way to use the crab-pine-sauce puzzle not just in the experiment but for some problem you’re working on in your job. But that kind of insight won’t come in the fifteen seconds you’re under the brain scan. More likely it’s after you finish the experiment, while walking home, or in the gym, or sipping a glass of wine in Paris. Kounios and Jung-Beeman’s traditional definition of creativity also refers to a “conceptual reorganization.” We now know that the brain reorganizes concepts not just when you have a creative idea, but constantly, as you learn and remember. Some reorganization is minor: for example, your concept of “apple” has changed slightly from knowing it’s an answer to one of Kounios and Jung-Beeman’s puzzles. You might now associate “apple” and “puzzle” in your mind, even if only a little bit and just for a short time. The sixth sense makes a conceptual reorganization by joining your unrelated memories of crabapple, pineapple, and applesauce. But the seventh sense makes a much bigger reorganization, such as joining the puzzle to a problem at your job. But again, their experiment cannot capture that, because it will happen much later, at an unexpected time.

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The creativity of the seventh sense is much harder to capture than the creativity of the sixth sense, at least in the artificial setting of brain scans. Kounios and Jung-Beeman are neuroscientists: psychologists also conduct creative experiments, and they have the freedom to set up situations that come much closer to real life. Let’s look at one such set of experiments to see how close they come to the seventh sense. The psychologists Kathleen Vohs, Joseph Redden, and Ryan Rahinel set out to see how your environment influences your creativity. They set up two rooms, identical in all respects except that one is messy and the other is neat. The messy room has a big work table with papers scattered all over and under it. The neat room has the same table with papers neatly stacked in rows atop it. When you enter the room, the researchers give you a task: come up with ten new uses for a ping pong ball in ten minutes. They take your answers and give them to judges who don’t know who you are or which room you worked in. The judges code your answers from one to three: a one means not at all creative and a three means very creative. So the higher the score, the more creative your answer. For example, using ping pong balls in a game other than ping pong gets you a score of one. Cutting the ping pong ball in half to make ice cube trays gets you a score of three. Sure enough, the subjects who worked in the messy room got higher scores. Vohs and her colleagues conclude: “Environmental disorder stimulates creativity.” On the one hand, this is a clever experiment that clearly shows a strong result. But again we might ask: Is this the sixth sense or the seventh? If you’ve never seen a ping pong ball before, you’re going to do very badly on this test. If you used ice cube trays this morning, that answer will come to your mind much faster. That means it’s an “obvious” answer

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to you—it came to mind quickly. So for you that was not a creative answer. But if the judges didn’t use ice cube trays recently, they will score that as “non-obvious”—that is, creative. So we’re back to the same problem. These tests of creativity measure your sixth sense. The more familiar the puzzle, the faster you solve it. If your answer is obvious to you but not obvious to me, I call it creative. If it’s obvious to me but not obvious to you, I don’t call it creative. What this kind of experiment really measures is how familiar an answer is to you and to the judges. That’s your sixth sense, and theirs. Once again, this is not a criticism of the scientists. Vohs and her fellow researchers successfully show that a messy room helps you come up with quick answers that strangers judge to be more creative, at least for a simple, playful task. Let’s call that “shallow” creativity. But for “deep” creativity, you need the seventh sense, and that’s much harder to capture in a time-bound experiment. Still waters run deep: you need time and calm to let your mind wander widely through all its shelves. So again, a flash of insight would more likely happen after the experiment, somewhere far from that messy room. As you brush your teeth that evening, your mind wanders back to the experiment, and it suddenly strikes you to try to use it to get your teenager to clean up her room— halfway. What if you divide the room in two, a creative side and a neat side, conduct the experiment with her, study the results, and see if that will convince her to be organized half the time, in half the room? You can see right away how your creative idea about your daughter is “deeper” than an idea for the ping pong ball: it took much longer to happen, it came when your mind was relaxed rather than working away at a task, and it solved a problem much more important to you. Does a messy room

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help you have “deep” creativity? I personally doubt it. But we just don’t know. Research on the “shallow” creativity of the sixth sense is certainly useful. For example, in the 1950s E. Paul Torrance pioneered standardized tests that measure creativity rather than IQ, to show that creativity and intelligence are two different but valuable skills. Thanks to Torrance and many others, education systems around the world increasingly aim to help students become more creative. That’s good. Yet all these tests and educational methods follow the same shallow model as the experiments of Kounios and Jung-Beeman, and Vohs and her colleagues. A 1972 article by Donald Treffinger and John Poggio, “Needed Research on the Measurement of Creativity,” points out exactly this problem. Alas, no one has solved it in the four decades since then. Time-bound scientific experiments still can’t capture deep creativity—that is, the seventh sense. We can see the shallow/deep problem quite clearly as well in a common creative practice: brainstorming. If I ask you to brainstorm—that is, to toss out ideas from the top of your head, right now—that’s shallow creativity. Tossing out ideas in a room is a quick and efficient way to gather the sixth sense of everyone there. Pooling the sixth sense of many people is more creative than drawing on only your own sixth sense. But for the most creative answers, use your seventh sense, not your sixth. That is, look outside the personal experience of whoever is in the room. By definition, brainstorming can’t do that. Schultz could have brainstormed forever with the Starbucks crew back in Seattle and never come up with his coffee bar idea. It lay beyond their personal experience. Search, not brainstorming, is the path to the seventh sense. And search need not mean you have to go to Milan like Schultz, or to London like Gandhi, although travel certainly

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helps. But it’s not the only way. Joan Affleck was in Paris, that’s true, and the light and wine and beautiful setting certainly helped her presence of mind. But she could have met her family friend in New Jersey, near her work. And if she is able to muster there the same presence of mind—without Paris and a glass of wine—the same flash of insight can strike her. Or they might have spoken by phone. Search is a mental activity, not just a physical one. Once you understand how the seventh sense works, you start to question not just brainstorming and messy rooms, but the many other claims about creativity you might run into. Such-and-such test will measure your creativity. That office design will stimulate your creativity. Creativity is innate—you have it or you don’t. Children are more creative than adults. Men are more creative than women. Women are more creative than men. Americans are more creative than Chinese. Online brain trainers make you more creative. Wear bright colors. Wear black. Think outside the box. Musicians are more creative than engineers. The more ideas you have, the greater the chance of having a creative one. And so on and so forth. In the end, most of our scientific knowledge of creativity is really about the sixth sense, not the seventh. Kounios and Jung-Beeman have captured presence of mind and a “shallow” flash of insight on their brain scans, but we don’t know for sure whether a “deep” flash would look the same. Many questions about flashes of insight in the seventh sense remain beyond our grasp. For example, are some people innately better at having them? Do children, men, and women vary in their ability to have them? Do different colors or settings affect it? My own guess is all these things matter to some degree. But as yet we have no good scientific way to know for sure.

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You can understand the urgency. Creativity is so important, we can’t just wait for a flash of insight to strike us at some odd moment. In work and in life, you have problems to solve, now. Everyone wants a shortcut to creativity. Perhaps one day we’ll find it. Meanwhile, remember that a key part of presence of mind is to accept calmly that you might not have a flash of insight. That your search might lead nowhere. That maybe, just maybe, this particular problem is one that you just can’t solve. So even for modern science, with all its new knowledge, equipment, and expertise, the most creative flashes of insight remain partly a mystery. Or even magic: that’s how it sometimes feels. And that’s how people often describe it. Here’s an example from Gwen Stefani, who has found success as a singer, songwriter, fashion designer, dancer, producer, and actor. Here are her thoughts on how creativity works: People might think you can turn creativity on and off, but it’s not like that. It just kind of comes out: a mash-up of all these things you collect in your mind. You never know when it’s going to happen, but when it does, it’s like magic. It’s just that easy, and it’s just that hard.

This is a wonderful statement from a creative person about the seventh sense. Stefani basically describes the method this book explains: things you collect in your mind come together as a “mash-up,” which means a new combination of previous elements. And you can’t turn it on and off, on schedule, like in a brainstorming meeting or in a research experiment. On the other hand, it still feels like “magic.” And sure enough, an aura of magic surrounds all the creative arts. The elements of the seventh sense can sound mechanical: presence of mind allows examples from history

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to combine in a flash of insight. But even so, creative thoughts maintain an extra element of mystery and magic. Of course, magic has always been a common explanation for something you do not know. As Roger Bacon, founder of the scientific method, said in twelfth-century England, “Many secrets of art and nature are thought by the unlearned to be magical.” We can imagine back in time that flashes of insight always seemed like magic to some degree. And that was not always a good thing. Centuries ago, in medieval Europe, many people thought that witches used magic for evil as well as good. Add religion, and magic becomes the work of the devil. The magic of the flash of insight could bring you terrible trouble. Here’s a famous example. You can tell this same story many different ways—and over the centuries, there are many versions of the tale. Here I tell it from the point of view of the seventh sense. It happened so long ago that we can’t rely on detailed records. We have to fill in some of the blanks with what we know about flashes of insight. In the year 1425, a peasant girl in eastern France hears voices. She sets off to do what the voices tell her: lead the French against the English, who are slowly but surely conquering France. In only two years, she succeeds in driving the English back. But in the end, the religious authorities try her for witchcraft, and burn her at the stake. You probably recognize Joan of Arc. At her trial, she told of hearing four different voices. One was unnamed, sent “by God.” From the view of the seventh sense, this might be her own voice—as you think to yourself, it can sound like someone else talking to you. Her other three voices were saints: Michael, Catherine, and Margaret. Why these three? That same year, the war with the English reached Joan’s little village of Domremy. The enemy burned it down. But also

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that year, the French won a rare victory at the fortress of Saint-Michel—that is, Saint Michael. It gave the people hope. Among the saints, Michael appears in armor to lead the angels in battle against Satan and his devils. As for Catherine and Margaret, both had statues in Joan’s local church. They were virgin martyrs: as Greek Christians they refused to submit to the pagan Romans who conquered their lands. The Romans put them to death. Now we can see the examples from history, in the form of saints, that combined in Joan’s mind. They told her to remain pure—a virgin, unmarried—and resist the English conquerors, like Catherine and Margaret, and take arms against evil, like Michael. These voices came to her not in the bustling village or its smoking ruins, but away from it, out in the surrounding fields, where Joan liked to go to calm her mind. Examples from history, presence of mind, flash of insight. To Joan of Arc, it felt like a divine calling. And in the end, the religious authorities agreed. Twenty-five years after her death, they retried her. They reversed the verdict and declared her a martyr to her faith. That began her journey to sainthood—like Catherine, Margaret, and Michael. As Gwen Stefani said, a flash of insight can seem like magic. A strong one gives you a calling, like Joan of Arc, Joan Affleck, Howard Schultz, or Mohandas Gandhi. It feels like something you absolutely must do, where it seems that your whole life has led to this magic moment. If you are religious, you might call it a higher power at work. Here, in this book, we call it the seventh sense.

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6

Resolution The Art of Passion

the fourth step of the seventh sense is resolution. This is the crucial stage in which you set out to make your idea a reality. A flash of insight happens in an instant, but acting on it and implementing it can take days, months, or even years. The stronger your flash of insight, the stronger your resolution to see it through. You will have not just an idea but also a passion to make the idea come true. Understanding this will help you as you begin to take action on your idea. That’s because, more often than not, you need other people to make your idea happen—family members or friends if it’s an idea for your personal life, or bosses and co-workers if it’s for your professional life. So communicating your idea is often a first step in resolution. But here you face a dilemma: you may have to hide your passion at first. Many people think reason and passion are opposites. They are wary of ideas that seem to come from your heart, not from your head. Not everyone is like this, of course: they may be wise enough to understand that passion

Resolution

and reason can happily work together. But until you know that for sure, be careful. Be strategic. Think through how to do it, exactly. Remember that you cannot expect other people to have presence of mind. They are not necessarily open to ideas that are different from their own. Give them the idea in pieces, just as it came together in your own mind, so that the pieces can come together in their minds too. That can help them see the idea, but that doesn’t mean they will like it. For that, you need to tailor the message to your audience. Do they like numbers? If so, mention numbers. Are they bureaucratic? If so, write up your idea in their standard forms or templates. Or they may always want to know what someone else thinks first—so go to that other person first. You win people over one by one, according to how each one best takes in ideas. If you’re faced with people who are especially cold to new ideas, try to warm them up slowly. Start with a subject that’s related to your idea, and mention something they said about the subject or something related from their own background. Then the next day, mention something else. And so on. Gradually work in the pieces of your idea until they are all familiar to your audience. Now they are more ready to hear your full idea. In all cases, when you talk to someone about your idea, make sure that you do not ask them to judge it. Do not say, “What do you think of this idea?” or “Do you think this idea will work?” These kinds of questions invite them to criticize your idea. And that criticism will come as snap judgments— that is, their sixth sense, from examples they’ve seen in familiar situations. If your idea is a new one, it won’t match their experience. So they’ll tell you all the reasons your idea won’t work. Introducing your idea in pieces, instead of asking their

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opinion of the whole idea, helps avoid the snap judgment of their sixth sense. You might ask: Isn’t criticism a good thing? When you’re passionate about an idea, perhaps you say to yourself, “I’m so excited that I’ve lost my objectivity.” You think you need someone else to look at your idea with impartial eyes, so you invite other people to tell you where you’re wrong. You might even say: “Here’s my idea. Please tear it apart.” And so, of course, they do—but from the wrong point of view. They use their sixth sense, not their seventh. You don’t have to go seeking criticism. It will come to you all on its own. People love to critique other people’s ideas. I once worked with a brilliant thinker named Deborah. She would listen intently to an idea, and every few moments she said something negative: “But that’s not true  .  .  .” or “That’s wrong because.  .  .  .” Of course in the moment I had no answer. After an hour of this, I got discouraged, exhausted, and just gave up. Looking back, I realize she disagreed with only 10 percent of what I said, and she was silent on the other 90 percent. But it seemed like she hated the idea, because 100 percent of what she said was negative. Now it might be true that my idea was bad. But bad or good, if the people you ask are anything like Deborah, you’ll have no resolution left. Under the weight of relentless negativity, you’ll give up on your idea before it’s even off the ground. So for your own sake, and for the sake of your idea, don’t invite criticism. Otherwise, most people will give a quick judgment about your idea because they’re comparing it to their own ideas on the subject. Of course they prefer their own ideas. When they criticize your idea, they’re really telling you that their own ideas are better. That’s human nature. If you seek out criticism, you’ll get it. Instead, seek first,

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understanding and second, suggestions for improvement. You and your idea will benefit far more. After all, just because you’re passionate about an idea does not mean you’re blind to its flaws. You can appreciate the strengths of your idea while still knowing there are weaknesses. Passion for your idea does not have to mean that you think it’s perfect—you should passionately want to make it better. That’s what you want most from other people: ideas to improve your idea, and for that they have to understand it. So instead of asking someone to judge your idea or tear it apart, try these five steps instead: 1. Explain your idea and how you got it. 2. Identify problems your idea will face when you put it into action. 3. Ask the person if they have ideas on how to solve those problems. 4. Ask if they have any other ideas to improve your idea. 5. Ask them to suggest anyone else you might ask these same questions. See the difference? Instead of throwing cold water on your resolution, they’re adding fuel to your fire. And that fuel is more ideas. Like Gandhi, you must recognize that your initial idea is only a start. Emmeline Pankhurst gave Gandhi the idea, but Leo Tolstoy helped him make it work—and sometimes you need that second idea before you take any action. These five steps help someone accept your idea by encouraging them to add their ideas to yours. When people contribute pieces of a puzzle, they are more likely to see—and accept— the picture that comes into view.

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Actively seeking more ideas is a key aspect of resolution. Just because you’ve had a flash of insight doesn’t mean that you no longer need examples from history and presence of mind. In all the examples of the seventh sense that I have seen, the original idea was never enough. Secondary flashes of insight changed the idea along the way. Resolution gives you the passion to take action on your idea, and part of that action should be to keep your mind open to other examples from history that your idea will need to succeed. The seventh sense is an ongoing cycle: first comes a flash of insight from examples from history and presence of mind, then resolution to act on the idea, then more examples and presence of history give you another flash to adjust your idea, and then resolution again, on and on through the life of your idea. We can see this cycle in an example from one of my students. I’ll call him K. He was an executive in my Executive MBA course. For the whole Executive MBA class, the school organized a trip to China during the spring break. On the first day of class back from the trip, K came up to me and told me this tale. Four years ago, he had an idea. From what he later learned in my course, he could think back and know that it was indeed a good idea—examples from history came together as a flash of insight in a moment of presence of mind. When he first had the idea, K told himself he should quit his job and pursue his idea instead. He told himself the same thing every morning—but he didn’t quit his job. He couldn’t get up the courage to do it. He felt like he was shivering with fright on the edge of a high diving board, repeating to himself: Just jump! But he didn’t jump. And he kicked himself for it, day after day after day, for four years.

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But over spring break, something happened. On the China trip, he met a woman working on something he hadn’t known about. Here’s what he told me: I explained my idea to her. And she loved it! We both saw how it fit what she was doing. We agreed to work together. I realize now the problem wasn’t resolution. My idea was incomplete.

I could see his excitement—his idea was moving, at last. It wasn’t courage he lacked: it was more ideas. His original idea was just good enough to give him enough resolution to keep the idea in his mind for four long years. But his resolution was not strong enough to make him take action—and that’s probably a good thing. Before the China trip, action on his idea would have been premature. Like Schultz before he met Greenburg, K needed someone to fill in a missing piece before he could see how to take action on his idea. K learned his lesson—and through him you can learn the same one. If you’re not taking action on your idea, perhaps you blame yourself for lack of resolution. But maybe the problem is different: your idea is incomplete. You don’t need the resolution to act: you need the resolution to keep looking for more pieces of the puzzle. Instead of kicking yourself, keep your mind open to improving the idea, and ask other people for their ideas too. When enough pieces fall into place, your resolution to act will come. Resolution makes you impatient to act, but sometimes you need to be patient until your idea is good enough to act on. This can be especially hard if you read in the newspaper, for instance, that someone has beat you to it. “I thought of that!” you say to yourself. “I knew I should have done it. Why was I such a wimp?”

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Don’t be so hard on yourself. You did not have the same idea, exactly. Let’s say you went to Italy, loved the coffee bars, and thought of starting a chain of them in the United States. Then a few years later you read about Schultz and Starbucks. “That was my idea!” And you call yourself a wimp for not taking action before Schultz did. But when you had your idea, were you working at an Arabica coffee retail chain? Probably not. Remember that Schultz’s idea was not “bring Italian coffee bars to America,” but rather “combine the Italian coffee bar and the existing Starbucks chain that I already work for.” You did not have that idea. He did. When you thought of bringing coffee bars to America, you did not see a course of action that made any sense for you to do. So you didn’t do it. Your flash of insight was partial. Like K before China, you were missing a key piece. That’s why your resolution to act wasn’t there. And that’s a good thing. Resolution to act is a shot in the light, not a shot in the dark. In a flash you see what to do. If you don’t see what to do, don’t do it. Instead, resolve to keep searching for more examples from history, and to keep your mind open, until your idea is complete. Here’s another example of partial resolution from my own life. It’s part of the story of how I discovered the seventh sense. I had the idea, but at first I lacked resolution. And then I found more pieces of the puzzle, and that gave me the resolution to act. And that’s all I do now: teach and write about the seventh sense. For seven years I worked for the Ford Foundation in Africa, based in Dakar, Senegal. I then moved to headquarters in New York City. At the time, the Ford Foundation’s mission was: “A resource for innovative people and institutions worldwide.” My job was to help each unit of the Foundation come up with a strategy for innovation. I quickly found that

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everyone had a different idea about what “innovation” and “strategy” meant. Most of the people I dealt with had PhDs, so they were brilliant at arguing for their own definition, but it made working together next to impossible. I do my version, you do your version. And never the twain shall meet. As you might guess—or if you’ve worked in a big organization, you already know—your impact is much greater if you can figure out how to work together. So I set out to solve the problem. I started with “strategy” because that seemed less mysterious than “innovation.” I went to the dictionary: if I gave everyone the official definition, at least they could agree on that. But that didn’t work. The definition was too simple: “a careful plan or method, a clever stratagem: the art of devising or employing plans or stratagems toward a goal.” Everyone could agree on that right away—your strategy is your plan to reach your goal. Then they would disagree completely on how to set a goal, how to make a plan, and how to decide on a strategy. But then I noticed something. I can still remember the exact dictionary I used: Webster’s Ninth Collegiate, with a pink cover. It’s a very popular edition, so you might have had a copy yourself. It happens to be the kind of dictionary that tells you when the word entered the English language. For strategy, it said “1810.” That seemed very late to me. I assumed that most ordinary words entered the English language centuries before that. I looked up goal and plan, and sure enough, the dates were 1609 and 1635. So perhaps there was something else interesting about the word strategy beyond its simple definition. So I went to the Oxford English Dictionary, which gives you the first time an English word appeared in writing. It turns out strategy first showed up in the New Military Dictionary of 1810, by Charles James:

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Strategy differs materially from tactic; the latter belonging only to the mechanical movement of bodies, set in motion by the former.

So the word “strategy” came from the military. That was news to me. Digging further, I found that the word entered the English language from the French stratégie. And it came in 1810 because that was the height of success of Napoleon Bonaparte, who won battle after battle across Europe. His enemies started studying his strategy, especially the English and Prussians, so that they could defeat him. And in 1815, at Waterloo, they did. From then on, “strategy” became a formal discipline, taught in universities. The first great classic of this era was a book I had heard about but never read: On War, by Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian. I wondered whether what Clausewitz said would apply to strategy in general, not just war. The cover of the book said that Clausewitz “distilled Napoleon into theory.” Perhaps that theory would help me figure out what to do about strategy at the Ford Foundation. If you’ve ever tried to read On War, you’ll know that it’s heavy going. Partly it’s the style of German intellectual writing of that time—try reading Kant or Hegel. But it’s also the subject: On War is mostly about strategic thinking, and that is very hard to explain, especially without the benefit of modern psychology and neuroscience. As I struggled through the book, I came to this section on something Clausewitz called “coup d’oeil”: This effortless coup d’oeil of the General, this simple art of forming notions . . . is so entirely and completely the soul of the right method of conducting War, that in no other but this broad way is it possible to conceive that freedom of

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the mind which is indispensable if it is to dominate events, not be overpowered by them.

Clausewitz clearly views coup d’oeil as a key element of strategic thinking. He wrote in German, here translated into English, except for the term coup d’oeil. For that he used French, the language of Napoleon. It means “glance,” or literally “strike of the eye.” You might recognize coup d’état, a “strike” at the state. Clausewitz uses coup d’oeil to mean a flash of insight, where an idea strikes you and you see in your mind’s eye what to do. And then it hit me. “Oh!” I said. “That’s the modern science of intuition.” Yes, that’s right: I had a flash of insight about flashes of insight. Two examples from history combined in my mind— Clausewitz, and current work on intuition. In my research into strategy methods, I had encountered “intuition” in the writings of Henry Mintzberg, which led me to Herbert Simon, which led me to Gary Klein. Simon and Klein explained “expert intuition” as rapid recall from personal experience. When I read Clausewitz on coup d’oeil, I understood it as “expert intuition applied to strategy.” Clausewitz added, “examples from history”: examples within or beyond your own personal experience that are the sources you draw on for your flash of insight. My flash of insight enlightened me, but I had no resolution to act on it yet. There were countless books and articles about his work—someone must have had noticed this connection before. But my resolution was strong enough to keep digging: the idea seemed important for my work, even if I did not quite see yet how to use it. I started reading through the literature on Clausewitz. Nobody mentioned the science of intuition. Meanwhile,

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in my regular job, I was working closely with a Japanese woman, Junko Chano. When I explained “presence of mind” as Clausewitz presented it, she said, “Oh, that’s martial arts.” That gave me another element to combine. It turns out she had done ken-do as a child—the Japanese martial art with sticks instead of swords. The instructor teaches presence of mind as preparation for both learning and combat. So I pursued that angle too, and that led me to the modern science of meditation, including brain scans of Buddhist monks that traced how they achieve presence of mind through mental discipline. But I still had no course of action in mind for myself. So I kept digging. I came across the “learning organization,” a popular trend in strategy at that time. Mintzberg endorsed it: since you can’t predict the future, detailed planning is useless, so instead you get started and learn as you go. But the exact mechanism of “learning” remained mysterious to me, since there is an infinite amount to learn about any one problem. Should you target your learning in any specific direction, I wondered? I found the answer at a talk by Steve Kerr, the world’s first “Chief Learning Officer,” from General Electric. He said you should aim to learn how other people succeeded at any part of your problem. Or “examples from history,” as Clausewitz would say. Kerr mentioned that GE’s corporate university in Crotonville, New York, played a key role in helping everyone find the examples they needed. But he gave very few details of exactly how. So a few weeks later, I went to Crotonville for a visit. George Anderson was in charge there, and he showed me around. He explained that new GE managers spend two weeks at Crotonville for leadership training and orientation about the company. I asked him about Kerr’s comment that Crotonville helps GE find examples to solve problems.

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“Oh that,” Anderson replied. “He means the Trotter matrix.” And so he explained. GE gave each new group of managers at Crotonville a real business problem to work on, where the company needs a new idea. They use a matrix, first devised by Lloyd Trotter, a senior GE executive in charge of electronics factories, and adapted by Kerr to apply to problems of any kind. The Crotonville group breaks the problem down into pieces—those are the rows of the matrix. They then spend two weeks searching within and outside the company for anyone who previously solved one or more piece. The places they search are the columns of the matrix. When they find enough pieces to plug into the matrix, they “see” an answer come together. This matrix method was the last thing Anderson told me. I thanked him and left. As I got on the train to return to New York City, the matrix method was on my mind. I stared out at the world going past the train window. The ride took an hour. And over that hour, resolution grew within me. I hurried off the train, ready for action. On that train ride, four elements came together in my mind: Clausewitz, the science of intuition, Asian martial arts, and GE’s matrix. No one else had noticed these connections. No one else made this combination. And I saw a path to write a book and teach my discovery, to show others how to put it into practice. So that’s what I did. And so far, it’s working: my classes and workshops for students and executives are always full, and my writing has turned into a series of books as the subject grows and I discover more about it. Looking back, I see now that my first flash of insight—the combination of Clausewitz and intuition—was partial. Two examples from history came together in my mind, but my resolution was only strong enough to keep searching, not to

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take action. At that point it never once occurred to me to leave my job: I was in my late forties, so starting a new career would seem out of the question. But then more pieces came together in my mind to show me the path ahead. When I finally saw that path, the resolution to act followed. And it continues to this day. I’m supremely thankful for it.

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7

Free Your Mind From Stress to Strategy

now that you know how the seventh sense works, we can turn to how to improve it in yourself. We start with the step that most people find the hardest to master—presence of mind. There are three main obstacles to presence of mind, and here we will see how to overcome each one. The first obstacle is the simplest: too much focus. We can see this from our examples so far. Had Schultz been too focused on the trade show, he would not have let the Milan coffee bar into his thoughts. Had Gandhi been too focused on lobbying the British authorities, he would not have paid attention to Emmeline Pankhurst. Focus is also a good thing, of course: if you never focus, you get nothing done. But if you always focus, you can’t have presence of mind. Divide your time between the two states: focus and presence of mind. For example, Schultz can bring a copy of the trade show program to the coffee bar, and focus on that for half the time. The rest of the time, he can sit back and clear his mind of his Starbucks work, what he expects from the trade show, his goals

Free Your Mind

for his job, and what he wants to do with his life. Only then can a new idea come into his mind. Or Gandhi: he can focus during his meeting with the British officials, and afterward read the London papers with an open mind. There are many hours in a day, many days in a week, enough both to focus and to practice presence of mind. It’s a question of mental discipline: mastering your thoughts, instead of letting them master you. Here’s one way to divide your time between these two mental states. If you’re working on a familiar task, go ahead and keep working until you finish, even if it takes until midnight. You already know what to do: you don’t need a new idea, you don’t need the seventh sense, you don’t need presence of mind. But if it’s a task where you need a creative answer, don’t work until midnight. Instead, carve out time for presence of mind. Through the workday, try to take in as many examples from history as possible that might relate to your problem. Don’t work late: spend the evening on something that gives your mind a rest. Go to the gym, have dinner with friends, or take a long shower, and above all get a good night’s sleep. This greatly increases your chances of a flash of insight to solve your problem. You can practice this discipline in smaller bits too, by scheduling time in your day for short walks, or making coffee, or some other activity where you give your mind a chance to clear, if only for fifteen minutes. Or in a boring meeting: let your mind wander from speaker to speaker, taking in whatever they say as a possible element to use later in some other idea of your own. Chances are, you won’t pick up something useful right then. But you never know. And it strengthens your power of presence of mind. The second obstacle to presence of mind is distraction. Your mind flits from one activity to another. Some call it

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“multitasking,” but in reality you cannot do many things at once. You do one thing in one moment, then something else in the next, and something else in the next. It’s rapid sequential focus. But your brain needs time to shift from one thing to the other. So the faster and more often you shift, the worse you perform on each task. And there’s not enough time between tasks for presence of mind. This problem has gotten much worse with the recent revolution in mobile devices, especially smartphones. They become an addiction, like sugar or fast food. You’re at a meeting, but every few minutes you wonder if you have a new text, a new email, a new posting from some site you follow. Like all addictions, the more you indulge it, the stronger it gets. So you might go from checking your phone every hour to checking it every half hour, then every ten minutes, then every minute. It can end up that every second you’re not checking it, you’re thinking in the back of your mind that you want to. As soon as you’re even the slightest bit bored, or have just one free moment, you go right to your phone. You might think that in a boring, useless meeting, there’s no harm done. But each time you look at your phone, you’re eroding your presence of mind. It’s much better just to sit there and let your mind wander, to give your brain a moment to relax in the midst of your hectic day. And perhaps somebody says something that connects with something else at the back of your mind—so even a boring meeting can help you toward a flash of insight. If your mind is on your phone, you’ll miss it. What if Schultz had his phone on the counter the whole time he was in the Milan coffee bar? Or Joan Affleck had her phone on her lap in Paris? Their minds would keep drifting back to the phone, and they would miss the big idea. The irony is that the digital revolution makes examples from history easier to find, but it also makes presence of

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mind harder to achieve. As with excessive focus, reducing distraction is a matter of mental discipline. In theory, it’s simple enough: just stop. Turn off your phone. But in practice, habits are hard to break, and more and more people expect you to reply within minutes to every message they send you. At least try to turn off your phone after work hours. If anyone complains that you’re out of touch for too long, direct them to iDisorder, a recent book by Dr. Larry Rosen that summarizes the research about how smartphones are making us efficient but dumb. Multitasking means you do each task worse than if you did only one at a time, and it reduces your ability both to focus and to come up with creative ideas. And the tide might be turning, thanks to the flood of articles, books, and testimony about the dangers of addictive devices. Today if you say you’re cutting down, it’s more like giving up smoking: someone might reply, “Good for you! I wish I could do it.” The third obstacle to presence of mind is the hardest to overcome, the most harmful, and it makes the other two— focus and distraction—even worse. That obstacle is: negative emotion. There are myriad forms of negative emotion, such as anxiety, jealousy, fear, or regret. They can lead to negative focus: when something upsets you, your mind stays focused on it. You dwell on it, chew on it, relive it again and again. While you focus on that negative thought, you cannot have presence of mind. As for excess distraction, some of it comes from simple boredom, but it also comes from the fear of negative thoughts flooding in whenever your mind is free. In a recent set of experiments, Timothy Wilson and seven fellow psychologists gave people fifteen minutes alone with nothing to do but shock themselves with nine volts of electricity. A quarter of

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the women and two-thirds of the men shocked themselves at least once. One guy shocked himself 190 times. Wilson and his colleagues begin their research article with a famous quote from John Milton’s Paradise Lost: The mind is its own place, and in it self Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n

Unfortunately, negative thoughts are stronger than positive ones. Kathleen Vohs ran another set of experiments with three other psychologists that showed, as their article title proclaims, “Bad Is Stronger Than Good.” Negative thoughts are stronger, last longer, and come to mind more quickly than positive ones. Negative emotions are also bad for your health, as an element of stress. You might have heard that some stress is good for you, and too much is bad, but that’s not quite right. Stress has two parts: pressure, and negative emotions in response to that pressure. Pressure is good: it releases a hormone, adrenaline, into your brain. Adrenaline increases your heart rate and the oxygen flow to your brain, so you think more clearly and your whole body burns sugar faster to give you more energy. In everyday life, pressure spurs you to action. You go to work in part because of the pressure to make a living. When the pressure increases, your adrenaline rises too. If you’re a musician with a concert next week, you have more pressure to practice. If you’re a student with a test tomorrow, you have more pressure to study. If you’re single and you have a date tonight, you have more pressure to look your best. Pressure tells you what to do, and adrenaline helps you do it. Negative emotions release a different hormone, cortisol, into your brain. Cortisol is bad for you. It dampens your

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immune system, and that lowers your resistance to disease. The stronger your negative emotions and the longer they last, the more damage the cortisol does to your body. Cortisol also blocks memory: if you’ve ever been too upset to think, that’s why. We know that all thinking depends on memory, to recall the words or images that come together to make up your thought. Cortisol prevents recall. A blocked brain is the opposite of a clear brain, so cortisol prevents presence of mind. The stressed-brain cocktail of adrenaline and cortisol served a vital function far back in time. When humans first appeared on earth, danger lurked at every turn. Adrenaline and cortisol together produce the “fight or flight” response. A lion appears: don’t think about it, just run. Cortisol stops you from thinking, and adrenaline helps you run. In our modern age, we don’t come across many lions. So except in those very rare cases when you need to fight or flee, cortisol is bad for you. The key to mastering stress is to respond to pressure without negative emotions. That gives you the benefit of adrenaline without the harm of cortisol. You have probably heard of common techniques for reducing stress: get enough sleep, exercise, surround yourself with natural greenery, and meditate. All of these methods work. But they all have one obvious drawback: you can’t do them all the time. They’re like pills that reduce pain: when the pill wears off, the pain returns. You awake from sleep, you come back from the gym or your meditation class, or you finish your walk in the park, and the orchestra of your negative thoughts strikes up the same old tune. Cortisol floods back into your brain. In addition to these stress-reduction techniques, we need a way to reduce negative emotions that you can do all the time, any time. Instead of fighting stress—the result of your negative

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emotions—you must fight the negative emotions themselves. But how? The Western tradition of clinical psychology offers various paths to achieve this. For example, Freudian therapy helps you identify and thus neutralize past traumas that cause your negative emotions. Cognitive-behavioral therapy helps you identify and then correct the irrational thoughts that cause your negative emotions. Humanistic therapy helps you find your strengths rather than dwell on the problems that cause your negative emotions. Positive psychology tells you to think about what’s good in your life and how to do more of that. But each of these methods has a fatal flaw. Say you have a terrible boss, and that’s what upsets you. You analyze your childhood, and that’s not the cause of your problems. Your thoughts are not irrational: your boss really is a monster. You are fully aware of your strengths, and you can think positive thoughts about the rest of your life, but your boss continues to make your life miserable. To find our answer, we must look beyond the tradition of Western psychology. We turn to Asian philosophy instead. It will help us see the whole problem of negative emotion from a very different angle. First let’s look at the science. A wonderful book by Sharon Begley presents the advanced research behind what I’m about to tell you: Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. It explains the activities of the Mind & Life Institute, and especially Dr. Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Mind and Life is a collaboration between neuroscientists and Asian philosophers to understand each other’s methods and to design joint experiments to test them. The Dalai Lama is the Honorary Chairman and an active participant. It was a Mind and Life conference where Elke Weber presented her neuroscience research on environmental thinking.

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The Art of Happiness, by Howard Cutler and the Dalai Lama, goes even further in bridging science and Asian philosophy. Cutler is an American psychiatrist who interviewed the Dalai Lama about negative emotions and put his answers into language that Western science can understand. Here I go one step further, and convert this science of Asian philosophy into a step-by-step method that you can follow yourself. In his day job, the Dalai Lama is the head of Tibetan Buddhism. Of course Buddhism is a religion, so in that role the Dalai Lama is a religious figure. But when he’s working on neuroscience and psychology, the Dalai Lama is nonreligious. Likewise, the method I show you here has no God or gods, no higher power. It’s straight strategy: how to figure out what to do. And the goal of this strategy is simple: free yourself from negative emotions to achieve presence of mind. I call the method Free Your Mind. The goal of Free Your Mind is simple: turn stress into strategy. The pressure of stress is good, while the negative emotions of stress are bad. Instead of reacting to pressure with negative emotion, you aim to react with presence of mind. That will let you get good ideas on how to take action about whatever it is that upsets you. In this way, Free Your Mind is your most important tool for improving your seventh sense. There are four steps to Free Your Mind: r
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Each of these steps is simple in theory but hard in practice. One step might take you only a minute while another can take you hours. Never rush. However long it takes you,

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for every negative emotion, follow all four steps. There are no short cuts–although like anything else, the more you practice this, the better you’ll become at it and the faster you can do it. Step 1: Problem To start, write down what’s bothering you. You might say, “I hate my job.” But try to be more precise. Why exactly do you hate your job? Perhaps the real problem is, “I hate my boss.” All right. Why exactly do you hate your boss? Perhaps your boss yells at you. Good—write that down. The more specific, the better. And it might be more than one thing: if there are three reasons you hate your boss, write down all three. How many problems should you list? All of them. There might be many reasons you toss and turn at night. Write each one down as a separate problem, on a separate page. Some might be hard to admit to yourself. For example: you hate your job but you don’t think you’ll ever find a better one. You don’t want to admit it, because you believe there’s nothing you can do about it, so you just try to put it out of your mind. It’s too painful to think about. But the truth is, you can’t keep it out of your mind: the thought keeps creeping back, especially at night as you try to fall asleep. So write it down as a problem. Don’t assume there’s nothing you can do. The rest of the exercise will help you figure that out. Step 2: Past/Future Take the first problem on your list and decide whether the problem is behind you in the past, or ahead of you in the future. These are the only two choices. You might say, “But it’s a problem I have right now.” That’s not correct. You are currently reading this sentence. Your problem is in the past or the future.

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If your problem is about your job, mostly likely it’s in the future. That is, you fear that Monday morning X, Y, or Z will happen at work. We call that a “future worry.” Or perhaps something bad happened at work last week. We call that a “past sorrow.” All negative emotions come from future worry or past sorrow, or some combination of the two. For example, you not only fear what might happen on Monday, but you also regret something bad you did at work last month, and you can’t get it out of your mind. So “I hate my job” becomes two separate problems. Label one “future worry” and the other “past sorrow.” Note that a problem is really an event: I regret that this past event happened, or I fear this future event to come. Step 3: Dharma/Karma The words dharma and karma are Buddhist terms from the Sanskrit language of ancient India. Like Latin, over the centuries Sanskrit became a written language only: very few people speak it today. Most texts of ancient Hindu philosophy were written in Sanskrit. Because Buddha was a Hindu of northern India, who then founded a new spiritual tradition around the year 400 BCE, many Buddhist texts are in Sanskrit too. The word karma has become common in English, to mean a mystical payback of sorts: if you do bad things, bad things will happen to you in the future. That’s bad karma. Or if you did good things, good things will happen. That’s good karma. This popular meaning is fairly close to the Hindu original. But here we use the Buddhist meaning of karma, which is “circumstances beyond your control.” We use the Buddhist meaning of dharma too: actions you take that are within your control. In the face of your karma, what is your dharma? That is the key question of Free Your Mind.

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The idea is to figure out whether you can do anything about your past sorrow or future worry. Sometimes you have to break the problem down further, because some parts you can’t do anything about, but other parts you can. This step is often very hard to do. But the very act of thinking about it reduces your negative emotion. Your mind moves off the track of your negative thoughts and onto a new track, trying to figure out what part of the problem you can solve. Your mind moves from fretting to thinking, and that reduces the cortisol in your brain. And that, in turn, improves your presence of mind and your thinking. For example, perhaps the reason you hate your job is because you worry that your boss will yell at you again. So far it has happened at least once a week, and you hate it FWFSZ
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do about it? When you think about it carefully, you may realize that your boss only yells at you while you’re alone. So can you arrange to see your boss always with someone else in the room? That would call for extra planning and scheduling on your part, and you would have to decide if it’s possible and worth the extra effort. But for now, write down dharma. That means there might be something you can do about it. Or you may realize that your boss yells at everyone, and so does your boss’s boss, and that someone who complained got fired right away. In that case, there’s a good chance that your boss yelling at you is completely beyond your control. Then you write down karma. Step 4: Actions Decide what action you might take for every item of dharma or karma. For dharma, be very specific. It’s a to-do list. If you decide to see your boss only with someone else in the room,

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write down exactly what steps you will take to try to make that happen. Who will that other person be? Will it be more than one person? How will you get them into the room? Will you tell them what you’re up to directly, or do it behind the scenes? If you decide in the end that there are no actions you can take to improve the situation with your boss, your dharma might be to find another job. Again, be very specific. How to find another job is seldom easy or obvious, although a later chapter in this book can help. You can pursue more than one dharma action at a time, even if they lead to different results. Let’s say you conclude that the only way to change your boss’s behavior is to talk to your boss’s boss about it. But this might take some time— your first need to make contact with your boss’s boss, and gain that person’s trust enough to mention your boss’s bad behavior. But you know that will take at least a year, so you decide to pursue that dharma at the same time you pursue the dharma to look for another job. Whichever one bears fruit first, that’s the path you take. This fourth step—actions—is often the most difficult. You know you would like to take action to solve a problem, but you don’t see what action to take. In that case, remember the seventh sense, and start searching for examples from history that solved the problem, at least in part. Keep on the lookout for answers in everything you read, see, and hear. Better yet, do an active search. The Internet makes this easier than ever before, and social media lets you extend the search into more delicate subjects that are hard to bring up in person. But don’t forget: you’re not seeking advice. You’re seeking previous examples of success. So far we’ve looked at how to find actions for dharma. Dharma transforms a stress or a negative emotion into ideas for action, and those ideas will occupy your mind and crowd

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out the negative emotion. But what if the problem is karma? By definition, that’s beyond your control. There’s no action you can take to solve the problem. Instead, there are actions you can take to overcome the negative emotion even though the problem remains. If the karma is a past sorrow, you can learn a lesson. This action is harder than it sounds, and again, the more specific the better. Let’s go back to the example of your boss, who humiliated you at a meeting. If this problem is a future worry, you try to figure out dharma—actions you can take in the future to prevent it from happening again, or to repair your image in the eyes of anyone at the meeting. But maybe that’s not what’s bothering you. You’re not afraid of it happening again, or worried about your image. It’s the past sorrow that upsets you: the humiliation you suffered at the time. That makes it karma: there’s nothing you can do about it because it already happened. You can’t undo the past. That’s when you ask: What lesson can I learn? There are many possible answers. Perhaps, when you look back clearly, there is something you did at the meeting that you want to avoid doing again in the future. It could be simple: you used PowerPoint, and a senior manager came to the meeting who hates PowerPoint. Instead of defending you, your boss criticized you. So your lesson might be to check before every meeting to see what the key participants expect, including your boss. In this case your problem switches from the karma of feeling bad at a past meeting to the dharma of how to keep from feeling bad at future meetings. And you see an action to take. Or your lesson stays karma: no matter how hard you prepare, there is always the chance that something unforeseen will happen. In this case, the lesson is a mental shift, not a concrete action for the future. You accept the karma of the

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situation without any negative emotion. If you are able to say to yourself, in all honesty, that you thought through the problem and every possible angle for what to do about it, your negative emotion subsides. That’s because a big part of negative emotion is the frustrated desire to solve the problem. Once you do your best to fulfill that desire, you can honestly say to yourself, “There’s nothing more I can do.” Your brain finds peace at last. :PV
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other traditions. The basic notion is timeless wisdom. For example, here’s the Greek Stoic philosopher, Epictetus: There is only one way to happiness, and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.

More recently, the Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a Serenity Prayer sometime in the late 1930s. You’ve probably heard some version of it: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can change, And wisdom to know the difference.

Things you cannot change are karma, and things you can change are dharma. Niebuhr doesn’t say how to sort them out—he’s a theologian, so you pray to God for that. Free Your Mind gives you a mental method beyond prayer to figure out your karma and dharma and what to do about each one. With enough practice, you can do the four steps of Free Your Mind quickly, in your head, whenever a negative emotion strikes you. The first time you try, it might take a few

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days for you to feel better. The next time, a day. The next time, a morning. The next time, an hour. The next time, a minute. Of course this is a very high standard that even the Dalai Lama struggles to achieve. But the idea is simple. Stress becomes strategy. Anxiety becomes action. Cortisol drains from your brain and the world gets clearer and brighter. As you get better at Free Your Mind, you get better at assessing your karma and dharma. For example, if you hate getting yelled at, you might first seek actions to avoid the person who yells at you. But later, you might go one step further, to the negative emotion itself. Why do you get upset when somebody yells at you? On the one hand, it’s a normal human reaction to hate getting yelled at. On the other hand, you’re the one who creates the emotion, not the person who’s yelling at you. Here’s another Stoic philosopher, the Roman Marcus Aurelius: If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

The Dalai Lama agrees. With enough practice, you can learn to have an accurate negative thought without it leading to a painful negative emotion. So ask yourself: Why exactly do you get upset when someone yells at you? You might say, “Because it’s unpleasant.” That’s a good reason not to like it, but it’s not a reason to get upset. Litter on the street is unpleasant too, but you don’t get upset every time you see it. Or you might say, “I don’t like being treated like that.” That’s also a good reason not to like it, but again, you can dislike it without getting upset. Perhaps the answer is, “It makes me feel like a child.” You might guess what I’ll say about that: whether or not you feel

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like a child is within your control. Next time your boss yells at you, say to yourself, “My boss is acting like a child. I’m acting like an adult.” Or if you think it will help, say it out loud to your boss. But still, why get upset yourself? If you go through all the possible reasons to get upset when someone yells at you, you end up concluding: there is no good reason. The best reaction is always to stay calm. Don’t let it get to you. Don’t turn the negative thought into a negative emotion. As you can see, mental pain is self-inflicted. That’s because all negative thoughts have the same cause: not getting what you want, either in the past or the future. Free Your Mind doesn’t ask if you’re justified in wanting what you want. It just assesses your chances of getting it. If you can’t get it, look for something else that you have a better chance to achieve. In this light, negative emotion is a strategic mistake. It’s a waste of time and energy. You should be spending that time and energy on trying to figure out an alternative path. Here’s an example of changing your path in a case of personal strategy. It comes from another of my executive students. I’ll call her Darla. She started Free Your Mind, but hit a big obstacle. Here’s her story.

Bad Karma This week’s class discussions of personal strategy and for handling issues that are bothering me right now I think will be the most valuable component of this course for me. I have three major problems that I’m trying to work through right now from a personal perspective that I hope the model will IFMQ
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especially for one incredibly personal issue:

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My best friend’s mother (a woman who is like my second Mother) is currently battling brain cancer. She was diagnosed in July and recognizes that it is terminal and my friend has left her job, and given up her life to be with her Mom and Dad right now. My friend is lonely, depressed and obviously generally upset with the entire situation. Plus my entire family is involved. My friend’s Mom is pretty much my Mom’s own best friend as well; they have lived next door to one another for over 30 years. They were pregnant at the same time with both my friend and me. They regularly spend time together. This is all happening where I grew up, just outside Vancouver. Here I am in NY feeling helpless with what I can do. Future worry, I guess. Dharma? The terminal cancer is out PG
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I talk to my friends at school and my husband for my own comfort. I recognize that I’m pretty much doing everything I can do at this point which I believe fits the model from class. BUT: It’s still on my mind and in my heart constantly. So I wonder if I’m not following the model properly, or if there’s anything else I can do to feel better.

Darla’s sad story is an extreme example of what goes on in the minds of many people throughout the day. Of course you care about your work, but you care more about the people you love. And when they suffer, you suffer. When people space out in a meeting, or seem preoccupied, often that’s what on

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their mind: past sorrow or future worry that has something to do with someone they love. In this case, Darla’s problem is that her negative emotion about the situation is with her constantly. She feels bad about her inability to make her friend’s mother and her friend feel better. Darla wants to feel better by making them feel better. Note that she doesn’t want to feel better about the death of her friend’s mother—she knows she can’t feel better about that. Darla is very clear on what she wants, and this is a great place to start. Note too that Darla has already searched for examples from history that solved the problem in similar situations from the American Cancer Society and her mother-in-law, who is a social worker. In this case, she’s probably done enough. Even searching more widely, she’s not going to find ways to make her friend’s mother and her friend feel better. The situation is just too dire. It’s very, very bad karma. So what is Darla to do? Here was my suggestion:

Bad Dharma What seems to bother you most is that your actions are not “helping.” But surely you’re helping to some degree—but not enough to make your friend or her mom feel any better. My guess is nothing can make them feel better: that’s karma you have to accept. So you have to adjust your goal to circumstances. You’re frustrated because you can’t help “enough,” which is an impossible goal. Instead, find a goal that you can achieve, and then improve your achievement of it, and feel good—or at least satisfied—about what you achieve. One goal might be to “show them how much you love them both.” My guess is you can achieve that. In her quiet—and last— moments, your friend’s mom will appreciate that enormously. And your friend will appreciate it now and forever.

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Note that my counsel here is for Darla to switch from an impossible dharma to a possible one. There is no way to make her friend’s mother and her friend feel better. Her karma will not allow it. A different dharma might have some lesser but positive effect. Instead of failing to reach the primary goal, Darla might succeed in reaching a secondary goal. A few weeks later, here’s what Darla told me:

Good Dharma Thanks to your reply, I took a second look at the issue I wrote about last month regarding my friend’s Mom and have attached some goals to the entire situation. As a primary goal, I want to ensure my friend’s Mom knows how important she is to me. I will likely write her a letter to give her while I’m home over the Christmas holidays. I also have a goal of making sure my friend comes to New York City for a weekend before my graduation so that she can take a much needed break. To accomplish this goal I will have to research upcoming NYC events to ensure there is something for her to come to that is important enough for her to commit to leaving for a weekend. For a final goal I will make sure I speak to my friend by phone at least once per week, and I will email her at least 4 times every week, if not every day, to make sure she knows I’m here for her. Setting these goals has made me feel better overall!

As we can see from Darla’s tale, Free Your Mind can help you achieve some good even in a situation that looks impossible. You feel better about it in the end, because it’s good to feel good about helping others feel better. You’re happier and they’re happier, or at very least all of you are less miserable.

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Note especially Darla’s feeling of accomplishment. Good for her and good for the world: instead of no effect on a large scale, she had a positive effect on a small scale. You feel good about having a positive effect. It’s not selfish to want to feel good, if what you want to achieve is something positive in the world. Because achieving it is good for the world, not only for you. Again, that’s far better for the world and for you than striving for something much bigger that you can never achieve. Note that in general, and in Darla’s case in particular, Free Your Mind is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. Instead, it’s strategic. That means you are pessimistic or optimistic according to the situation. Pessimism in the face of bad karma is a good idea: it means you should look for a better dharma. Pessimism in the face of good dharma is a bad idea: it can sap your resolution. Vice-versa for optimism. So if someone ever asks you if you are an optimist or a pessimist, tell them: “Neither. I’m a strategist.” Darla used Free Your Mind to solve the problem of a conflict between her desires and the karma she faced. But there is another possible solution: have no desires at all. The less you want, the less unhappy you are about not getting what you want. And there is a strain of exactly that view in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. These are the hermits and ascetics, the wise old man sitting at the mouth of a cave in cartoons. These hermits want nothing, and that makes their dharma simple: withdraw from the world and meditate instead. If the source of all negative emotions is not getting what you want, then wanting nothing eliminates all negative emotion. As you can see, Free Your Mind does not take that view. And neither does the Dalai Lama: he is very active in trying to change the world for the better, for example through his environmental work. The Buddhist tradition is long and

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diverse, so you can find both strains within it: withdraw from the world versus act in the world. But in smaller doses, withdrawal is good. You should sometimes give up your desires. Free Your Mind eliminates conflict: not conflict between people, not conflict with yourself, but conflict with karma. And you do that by eliminating desires you cannot achieve. As we saw, Darla did that to some degree. The key is to do it happily, as she did, instead of with bitterness and regret. For each of your negative emotions, ask yourself if you should eliminate a desire. Take the example of your boss yelling at you, and the paths you can choose: to seek a dharma so that your boss doesn’t yell at you, or to eliminate the desire for your boss to stop yelling at you. Accept it as karma. It does you no harm. You give up your desire to find a dharma to change it. This is a good way to sort out the karma you face. Save your dharma for big goals, your big desires. There are countless smaller goals, smaller desires, where the best action is to give them up. Otherwise, you spend your life feeling sorry for yourself for a long list of things you can’t get that you want, while in reality, you are probably far better off than your ancestors could ever dream of. It’s an irony of modern life that the more people have, the more they want. Despite tremendous prosperity in the Western world over the past several decades, happiness surveys show that in general people are no happier than before. Over the years the sum total of happiness fails to increase, despite the overall rise in prosperity. If you want to be richer, that’s fine. Just don’t be unhappy about it. Or perhaps it’s not that: most people want more out of life, not just more money. Despite all you have, there’s something more you want to do, but you’re not even sure what it is. You just know it’s more fulfilling than what you do

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now. Free Your Mind can’t help you there, because you don’t have a specific desire or a specific goal. It’s an overall feeling of wanting more, but you’re not sure what, and you’re not sure how to figure it out. For that, the seventh sense gives us a different method. It’s the subject of our next chapter.

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8

Personal Strategy Map In Search of Passion

what should you do with your life? Most college graduation speakers offer the same advice: follow your passion. This is harder than it sounds. Most of us have many conflicting passions. If you’re one of those college graduates in the audience, your passions might include a job with high pay, a congenial work environment, music, international travel, taking care of your aging parents, a Nobel Prize in chemistry, marriage and children—and making kites. The problem is that many of these passions conflict. Take making kites: perhaps you live in Canada, and the only job in that field is in Australia. It pays only room and board, and you can barely afford the airfare to get there. To pursue this passion, you would probably have to give up every other passion on your list, except for international travel—although even there, you would only travel to one country, Australia. So the problem is not whether or not to follow your passion. It’s which of your passions to follow, when, and how?

Personal Strategy Map

Your seventh sense gives you the answer. It puzzles through the many things you might possibly want and the many possible ways to get them, and fails to find a match for kites. There is no flash of insight. You don’t see a way both to make kites in Australia and to achieve other important things you want out of life. So you don’t go to Australia. Your desire to make kites is less than your other desires: to stay out of poverty, to stay close to your loved ones, to pursue a career with a future. Making kites is only one of your desires. Your seventh sense knows them all. It’s hard to accept sometimes, but every step in life is a compromise between what you want and what you can do. Graduation speakers tell you to do what you want. Leonardo da Vinci tells you something else: As you cannot do what you want, want what you can do.

Of all people, Leonardo da Vinci! He was the original “Renaissance Man,” famous for his achievements in both science and art. Surely Leonardo was such a great mind that he could do whatever he wanted. But no, he couldn’t. So instead of doing what he wanted, he learned to want what he could do. In particular, he did not want to paint religious scenes or portraits for wealthy families. Yet he did exactly that, for example, the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, two of the greatest masterpieces in the history of art. Of course it’s not quite as stark as Leonardo puts it— either one or the other, what you want or what you can do, and nothing in between. In reality, it’s a mix of both. You figure out what you can do and also what you want. Where they intersect, that’s what you do. In other words, karma and dharma. For the karma you face, what dharma can best achieve what you want?

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In all cases, choosing your attitude toward your karma is the very first act of dharma. Leonardo could not choose his subjects to paint, but within that karma he found a dharma and turned what he painted into great art. The money he made from that paid for his passion for science, especially all his inventions. He found a way. It was not his ideal way, but it was the best way he could find, given the circumstances. In the face of his karma, he found the best dharma. So how do you decide which passion to pursue, and how far, and which one to give up? Here’s some advice from Albert Einstein: One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.

Einstein wrote this in a letter to a physics student who set out to solve a problem too far beyond his training up to that point. Instead, Einstein advised him to solve the next level of difficult problem. And then the next. Reaching too far is a recipe for failure. Even Einstein’s greatest achievement, his Special Theory of Relativity, came after five other scientists, from five different countries, had solved key pieces of the puzzle: Poincaré, Minkowski, Mach, Lorentz, and Maxwell. Einstein’s “greatest efforts” put the pieces together. But the pieces were already there. We’re back to the basic elements of the seventh sense. Examples from history tell you the gamut of possible dharmas in the face of various karmas that humans have faced before. Presence of mind erases all negative emotions from your current karma to free your mind to look for and see possible combinations of dharma. The flash of insight shows you that dharma as the way through your current karma. Resolution gives you the strength to follow that dharma

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through the many obstacles your karma will surely throw your way. This understanding of karma and dharma in following your multiple passions leads us to our next practical tool: the Personal Strategy Map. It helps you organize your thoughts about your passions, goals, obstacles, and possible actions. It does not give you a plan for action, but rather lays out the possible paths where your desires and actions might take you. It’s not strategic planning for your career. It’s strategic thinking about your life. It helps you understand your present and future karma, and to identify possible dharmas to fulfill your multiple passions. There are four components to the Personal Strategy Map: r
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Try to fit the Map on a single sheet of paper. If it spills over, get a bigger sheet. An electronic document is fine too, as long as your screen is big enough. It’s important to see the whole thing together, as a single view. Fill out the Map as best you can, as honestly as you can for your current thinking. If you can’t answer one of the questions, then write in question marks as placeholders for future ideas that strike you. It might take you an hour, or a day, or a week to complete the Map. It depends on how complicated or difficult are your passions, goals, obstacles, and actions. If your future is closely bound up with someone else, do the Map together. You can do this exercise every few years, especially at turning points in your life and career, to make sure you

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know your current mind about these various elements of personal strategy. The elements change over time, and this tool give you a chance to take stock of what you think about them at any given moment. It’s a periodic check-in with your seventh sense. Step 1: Possible Passions On the far left of your blank sheet, make a list of your possible passions. These can range from current, active interests to something you have never done but would like to do if you can find a way to do it. It might include what you do or might enjoy, what you are or might be good at, or what does or might give you meaning. Remember that you are laying out possibilities, not deciding on a shortterm course of action. You’re not choosing a single passion. You’re honestly listing all the passions you might want to take action on (dharma) if circumstances (karma) work out. So your possible passions can be varied and even contradictory, such as “travel the world” and “stay at home with the kids.” If both are true interests, list them both. As Walt Whitman wrote: Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.

There are “multitudes” of possible paths you could take, multitudes of people you could be, multiple lives you could lead. At this point, list them all. Step 2: Possible Goals On the far right of your sheet, make a list of possible goals that each possible passion might lead to. Be specific and

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ambitious. The answer might not be obvious. Take your time to figure it out. For example, one of my MBA students put down “figure skating” as a possible passion. That’s because she was good at it when she was younger, and loved it. She didn’t win any championships, and eventually she gave it up. But it remained in her heart as something she loved. So she wrote it down on the left-hand column. So far so good. When she thought about possible goals for that on the right-hand column, she knew she was too old and rusty to skate in competitions. And she already had a good job offer in a big consulting firm, which satisfied a different passion, “Make a good living.” There was no obvious goal to fulfill her passion for figure skating. So instead of rushing to judgment, she calmly, with presence of mind, searched for examples from history that might show her the way. She asked around and looked up careers in the field. Lo and behold, a flash of insight showed her a possible goal: international judge. This was a clear and strong example from history in the field of her passion. The job pays very well, you to travel to great locations, and you’re part of the world of figure skating at a very high level. How to get there—dharma—fit her current karma. First you volunteer in your spare time at local competitions. After a few years of that, you get picked to volunteer at regional events. Then you graduate to getting paid a little at more prestigious events. Then you’re paid more at even bigger events, still in your spare time. Eventually you’re in the running for one of the few full-time jobs that pay well for international events. Or you’re in a position by then that you don’t need to earn so much: you can work part-time at that level. Another MBA student wrote down as a possible goal in the right-hand column become Minister of Finance for her

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home country in Latin America. This is an excellent goal, both ambitious and specific. That was the first thing she wrote on her Map, so she went back to the left-hand column—possible passions—and thought about why she wanted that job. The answer was twofold: a strong interest in finance, and a desire to serve her country. She wrote those down on the left. Next, she went back to the possible goals column on the right and asked: Is there any other ambitious goal that would fulfill one or both of these interests? Of course the answer was “yes.” So she wrote those down too. And so on, back and forth across the Map. Step 3: Obstacles and Actions Next you ask yourself: How do I get from the first column on the left to the last column on the right? There are concrete actions to take, and real obstacles you face. These are guideposts for your future resolution, if you decide to take that path. You write them down, divided up between short term and long term. The short-term ones go on the left half of the Map, next to possible passions; that is, these are immediate actions you might take, or obstacles you might face soon, as you work toward fulfilling a passion. The long-term actions and obstacles go on the right half of the Map, next to possible goals. It helps to break these down even further: shortterm actions and obstacles as two different columns on the left, and longer-term actions and obstacles as two different columns on the right. For example, our figure skater wrote down “volunteer at local events” as a short-term action. A longer-term obstacle is “very few high-level judging jobs.” Our future Minister of Finance wrote down “get a job back in my country” as a short-term action. As a longer-term obstacle, she wrote down “party politics”—beyond technical qualifications, high-level

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government jobs in her country require you to have the right party credentials, and you can’t predict which party will be in power years ahead of time. Remember that all entries on the Personal Strategy Map are possibilities, not decisions. You’re not deciding anything from this Map. You’re just laying out strategic thoughts about the possible paths your life could take. Step 4: Possible Future Stepping Stones This step is simple: you leave a blank column between the left and right halves of your Map. Write in the column, “Possible Future Stepping Stones.” Nothing to it, at least as a mechanical step. As a mental step, it’s the hardest of all. If you’re ambitious, or used to achieving what you set out to do, it will be hard to leave anything blank on the Map. You’ll want to fill in a complete path from a passion in the left column to a goal in the right. But it’s this blank space that will allow your seventh sense to work. The blank column is a constant reminder for presence of mind, and to keep your mind open to opportunity at all times. You don’t want to be so focused on becoming Minister of Finance that you miss an opportunity for a different position that fulfills the same passions. As your seventh sense goes to work, presence of mind keeps you open to the different possible passions, actions, and goals on your Map. When you encounter a new possibility—a new example from history—a flash of insight shows you a way to take an action toward a goal that fits a passion. A stepping stone appears, unforeseen, that moves you along your path. Or the flash of insight may give you a new goal, or spark a new passion. When life takes a sudden twist, this Personal Strategy Map helps you see where it fits in your overall life strategy, and you can update the Map accordingly.

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You can see right away how this Personal Strategy Map differs from traditional advice to make a “five-year career plan.” For that, you decide what you want most, then plan out all the steps to get there. It’s a single goal with a single course of action. Instead, the Map lays out multiple possible goals, some of them contradictory, and possible paths to get part of the way to each one, without deciding anything. These leaves room for your seventh sense. The Map is not a plan—it’s a chance to aim high, like our future Minister of Finance. You  rely on your  seventh sense to stop you from aiming impossibly high and wasting a lot of time, energy, and passion. For example, perhaps you love the tradition and trappings of royalty, and you really want to be Queen of England. You could make a plan to develop your royal sixth sense, so you gain all the skills and expertise you need to do a good job as Queen. But your seventh sense in general, and your Map in specifics, will tell you that the karma against you is just too great. There is no dharma to reach that goal. The job is hereditary, and you are not a member of the British royal family. Yet another graduation speaker might tell you to “never give up your dream” or “you can do anything you set your mind to,” but you know that’s not always true. Your seventh sense tells you so. We can see once again that the seventh sense is circular, not linear. Your presence of mind allows you to put together examples from history in flashes of insight, and with enough of these examples together, further presence of mind can either show you the path forward or can show you further examples from history. Your seventh sense gives you a series of flashes of insight that help you along the way to a goal that meets one or more of your passions.

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Below I show you two Personal Strategy Maps from one of my students. The first one she did for class, and the second one she did eight years later, at a very different phase of her life. Appendix B gives more examples. The authors of all these Maps are my MBA students as they graduate from Columbia Business School. They come from many countries but they have much in common: they are all in their late twenties or early thirties, have done well academically and at work, and have the ambition, interest, and means to invest the time and money in an MBA degree. That makes them quite fortunate: they have more opportunity, and more control over their circumstances, than most other people in the world. If your ambitions and circumstances are very different from my students, these Map examples can still help you by showing the steps of the exercise and offering specific ideas that you may find useful yourself, at least in part, in very different situations. The Map is most helpful when you are in transition: finishing a graduate degree, like these students, or finishing college, or thinking about changing your job, or about having a first child, or other circumstance that change your life. It’s a way to take stock of your aims and ideas about your personal strategy, not all the time, but at key points—like crossing the border into a new country as you make your way across the continent of your life. Where to go next? Perhaps you already know, but perhaps in redoing your Map, somewhere else appears.

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A Wild Turn Michelle Fertig April 2006 This class came at the perfect time in my life. Perhaps I was ready to hear the message. I’ve really been challenged in the class because I previously thought I could create a workplan for everything—my life was about plan to work, work the plan! Something happened this semester that very much altered my career workplan and this class has taught me that I can turn the unexpected into new opportunities and that it is OK if I alter my goals based on changing circumstances. I found out that I am expecting a baby this summer, and while my husband and I are thrilled, I know that now—more than ever—I have to be flexible about my future plans because at this point there are more unknowns than knowns. As if the class was in synch with my personal situation, I was very pleased to learn about the tools available to help guide my future career path—or at least write down a direction even if I’m not sure what that direction will eventually lead to. I received the personal strategy tools at a point when I felt completely overwhelmed by my situation, and the “Free Your Mind” and “Personal Strategy Map” really helped me to just relax, knowing that I still do have options. With every obstacle that I thought would be a road-block, I realized that there are possible actions. I actually had fun brainstorming what I can do to overcome such obstacles, which was different from my typical reaction to feel overwhelmed. While I know that my life will take a wild turn next fall, the Personal Strategy Map and my understanding of coup d’oeil helped me to realize that my life is not as extreme as I sometimes make it out to be, meaning that I don’t have to achieve all my goals tomorrow and that my next decision will

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not be my last decision. I do have a wide range of goals and not all are black or white. Looking at my map, I can see that there are many goals that I can achieve—some aspects can be achieved at the same time and some at different points in my career. I am now more at peace with what I don’t know. I think the best thing I can do now is to continue to relax about my situation and be more open regarding change. From the principles learned in class, I want to talk to other women who have careers and children and learn about their experiences. In fact, I just started a Mother’s Network club at school so I will have access to such people, and hope to take elements of what worked for these women to create balance in my own life. We had our first roundtable discussion last Friday, and it was comforting to meet women in my situation, as well as those who have been in it before. This class has been a great experience, and couldn’t have happened at a better time. I can say that in five years from now—or even after one year—my career goals may be significantly different based on the new experiences that are sure to come. That is OK for me, as my definition of success is no longer achieving that single high goal but is rather being prepared, open and ready to take advantage of the moment when a coup d’oeil unveils the perfect opportunity however different from my own limited vision.

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Possible Actions

Can’t resist leaving baby once it’s born

Work for Deloitte for at least 2 years to get tuition reimbursed

Possible Passions

New Baby

Consulting

STONES

STEPPING

FUTURE

Set priorities at work— besides, it’s quality time, not quantity— right?

Network within the firm to get staffed on local projects, even if it means slowing down career progression

I might not find any local projects and could be forced to travel— this would be unacceptable with a newborn at home

POSSIBLE

Husband can be the breadwinner

Get a housekeeper and part-time nanny to help out

I get bored easily—and I hate doing laundry and chores UNKNOWN

Possible Actions

Possible Actions

Possible Obstacles

Table 8.1 Personal Strategy: Coming to Terms with My Career + Baby

May require too many hours at work and not enough time with family

School loans too big to not work

Possible Obstacles

Make Partner at Deloitte and outsource everything (e.g., cleaning, childcare)

Be a stay-athome mom

Possible Goals

Live abroad for just a couple of years

Develop strong business relationships while at Deloitte for the next 2 years Volunteer for other causes in addition to work

Husband is enrolled in the Global EMBA program and will acquire international network

Buy a franchise, so business is ready-made

Work at one of Deloitte’s clients

Owning a business

Get another loan?

If I enjoy a particular client, find out the details

Do not have enough capital to invest

Industry job

May not be legal because of Sarbanes?

International Take advantage Husband may not be able to Travel of Deloitte’s quit job to move Global Development Program and move family overseas

Live in another country where hired help is cheap and would give international work experience

Not challenging enough?

Get a job at Johnson & Johnson

Not enough Own a consulting firm clients—or income to go solo

Extended family may have a hard time if I pack up the first grandchild and move

Personal Strategy Map

A New Path Michelle Fertig April 2014 It has been eight years since I first reflected on a Personal Strategy Map, in Professor Duggan’s class at Columbia Business School. At the time, I remember being nervous and a bit scared to start my post-MBA career as a new mother. The frameworks that I learned in this class showed me that I had options, and if those options did not work, I had other options. Equipped with the confidence of knowing I did not have to choose being either a full-time mom or a full-time traveling consultant, I ventured back to my professional services firm and got staffed on a local project. Interestingly, since I developed my first Map, I have pursued and achieved many of the actions across the possible passions that I initially listed: I returned to Deloitte and continue to work there today; I enjoyed stretches of time on maternity leave (three times!) or on projects where I could increase my at-home flexibility; my family traveled with me to India on a global deployment; I worked on internal teams where Deloitte was my client; and, I have helped my husband launch a business. One key take-away for me is that you do not have to achieve everything at once or pursue only one goal—different stages of life or career enable different paths to choose. Now, eight years later, with the same objective of developing a forward-looking Personal Strategy Map, I do not have the same fear of the unknown. Rather, my focus has been more on what is important to me in my personal and professional life. Compared to my initial map, I continue to be passionate about international travel, entrepreneurism, and having adventures with my family. My possible goals are different, and perhaps more informed—simply based on my life experience. I know more about my strengths and skills, and where I could possibly go from here.

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The interesting thing about doing this exercise again is that I realized I had become complacent in my current position. For the past several years, I have been working in internal strategy teams. My current role involves managing an international program, which offers the flexibility of working from home as well as the excitement of influencing our global service delivery. Before developing my Map 2.0, I had not given too much thought to my goals beyond where I am today. I had my children, a good job—why change? Well, because I can! As in my initial map, one of my possible goals was to make partner at Deloitte. I have not thought about this goal in a while since I did not think it was still an option given my current role. Since writing it down as something I could go for, I have had a nagging thought—why not go for it? If I do not make it, what would happen? I have the comfort of knowing that it would be OK—I would simply work toward another goal. If I do not at least try, then I will miss the opportunity and never know. I love the freedom of this framework—it encourages you to go for things that your mind (or confidence) may have pre-emptively eliminated. Why not at least explore? With the support of my family and colleagues, I am taking the first steps to pursuing the partner path. Sure, it is a risk to leave a comfortable position, but simply being open to the possibility has opened up new doors for me. I am broadening my network, considering ways to leverage my experience and skills, and being introduced to new roles that I did not know exist. I am doing this because my passions extend beyond my current role and simply, because it IS achievable. It is an exciting journey, and I imagine that eight years from now, I will have ventured across multiple goals and actions of this refreshed Map. It is truly rewarding to think freely, without limitation, on what it is I could do, where I could go. I fully expect this next “turn” to be just as wild as the first—and that is the adventure of the ride.

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Possible Actions Identify my own opportunity and socialize it with the French firm

Seek out an advisory board of b-school friends, current entrepreneurs and VCs to help vet out my idea Do a lot of due diligence about the job requirements and reality of the career path before I make the switch

Possible Obstacles

There is no available position suited for my skill set/ interests

No one likes my business idea; doesn’t get any traction

The job may be terrible (e.g., long hours, heavy travel, dysfunctional teams; clients who don’t buy)

Possible Actions

Let career counselor and French counterparts know about my interests

Participate in local entrepreneur groups (e.g., .FFU6Q

Inform my career counselor that I want to go on Partner track; begin transition process

Possible Passions

Experience another culture; language

Create new technology solutions

Sell professional services (Talent Mobility) for Deloitte

Table 8.2

STONES

STEPPING

FUTURE

POSSIBLE

UNKNOWN

Identify a technology co-founder

Explore ways husband can do something in European— perhaps work on his business plan

Possible Actions

Start my own app company

Pursue an expat assignment in France

Possible Goals

I do not have Transfer to a business unit technical and make skills Partner

Husband may not be able to move his career to France for two years

Possible Obstacles

Develop a business case on why global behavior will better serve and grow our clients, and the incentives needed to drive behavior

Business case is not approved

International travel

Explore sabbatical options

We can’t afford to not get paid for three months

While I want to Enjoy kids at Explore home requirements to spend time with my kids, I don’t teach at home want to leave my corporate job

Influence a stronger global mindset among Partners

Take family on a Semester at Sea trip—a voyage around the world We can’t afford for me to stay at home Move to a lower-cost neighborhood

Be a homeschool teacher

This type of Get senior Partner support initiative is GSPN
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Explore other ways to spend more meaningful time at home— craft night or weekend tradition Begin saving for the trip; or change goal to a one-week vacation

Launch a program that incentivizes Partners to sell across borders

Partner expectations are really high; I may not be good at what I do

Identify a strong mentor who can help me develop the skills I need to be successful

Find other ways, even without money, to help increase the connectedness of our Partners (e.g., Communities of Practice; make connections of mutual interest, keep driving one account at a time)

9

Idea Networking In Search of Opportunity

free your mind and the Personal Strategy Map both help you prepare for opportunity. But if opportunity takes too long to arrive, then you need to go out and find it—and that leads to our next personal strategy tool: Idea Networking. You probably know about networking or have already done it yourself. Networking has become a standard technique to search for opportunity, especially a new job. First let’s look at the traditional method of networking, and then we will see how Idea Networking takes better advantage of your seventh sense. We find a good illustration of traditional networking in a 2009 article by Laura Holson in the New York Times. Holson reports on two networking events that took place during the economic crisis that followed the Wall Street crash of 2008: With the economy in the tank, one can never have too many friends. . . . With companies firing workers in droves and those with jobs worried that they could be next, 2009 is shaping up to be a golden era of networking.

Idea Networking

One such event was a monthly “Meetup Group” in Silicon Valley. The group capped attendance at 200 and always turned people away. Guests “tend to focus on two things: how long will the recession last, and whom can they meet who will help them if they are laid off.” The other event took place in New York and was much smaller: seventeen female executives went to a spa retreat, where they “discussed career prospects in an unsettled economy.” One participant, Katherine Wu, explains her strategy: “I equate this to dating. Networking is a basic numbers game. If you don’t get out, you won’t meet as many people.” Holson also interviewed a thirty-two-year-old media executive named Sonja Kosman who “attends two career-related events in New York every week” and networks online through Meetup.com, LinkedIn, and Facebook. These digital tools allow you to boost your networking numbers to hundreds, even thousands of contacts. Kosman explains: “You don’t know where the opportunities are going to come from. They could come from sites. You could meet someone at an event, at the grocery store. You have to be open to anything. . . .” At first glance, this kind of “numbers networking” might seem to fit the seventh sense: you can’t predict who will have a job lead for you, so you keep searching until you find one. And you don’t let failure bother you. As Thomas Edison said about his light bulb: I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

But is that really how Edison succeeded? A deeper look reveals something very different. In reality, Edison was a master of taking what others did and making a new combination that worked. For example, the light bulb: Joseph Swan

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invented the bulb, and Lewis Latimer figured out the filament. Edison put them together. If we apply Edison’s actual method to networking, you don’t want to meet 10,000 people in the hope that one will click. You want to meet Swan, and you want to meet Latimer. Meeting 9,998 other people first is a waste of time. Not only that—it’s depressing. That many failures will kill your selfconfidence. If you see networking as a “numbers game,” the raw truth is that the numbers are stacked against you. In Idea Networking, you give up the “numbers game” and play the “idea game” instead. This shift lowers the quantity but raises the quality of all the steps you take. You find your Swan and Latimer faster, easier, and with much less mental pain. Idea Networking starts with—you guessed it—an idea. This idea needs to take the form of a question that two people find interesting: you, and the person you ask. Coming up with this idea, this question, is the hardest step. The rest takes much more time, but is much easier to do. Let’s go back to the networking events that Holson wrote about. Here were the key questions that people asked at these events: r
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economy? These questions are simply not interesting to the person you ask. They’re about what you want, not what the other person might want. People might expect to hear such questions at a networking event, but that still doesn’t make the questions interesting. In fact, the whole category of questions

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about how you can find a job is interesting only to people who like you a lot or who will benefit directly from getting you a job. That is a very small number of people. So if you go for numbers networking, of the 10,000 contacts you make, maybe 50 or so will find these kinds of questions interesting. The other 9,950 will not. The essence of traditional networking is low-quality questions and a high volume of contacts. Idea Networking does the opposite: high-quality questions and a low volume of contacts. Instead of asking many people uninteresting questions, you figure out a question that interests you, and you only ask those people who will find your question interesting. Of course, you can’t know for sure that they’ll find it interesting until you ask them. But if you come up with a good question and are very strategic about your contacts, there’s a good chance that you’ll interest almost everyone you ask. The best way to come up with a good question is to start with your Personal Strategy Map. You want an idea that fits a possible passion, especially one that you would like to pursue sooner rather than later. That’s because Idea Networking will uncover opportunities that you might want to take up right away. If you have more than one possible passion that fits this description, come up with a question for each passion. You’ll ask a separate set of contacts, of course, because different questions are interesting to different people. Here’s an example. Once again, it comes from an MBA student at Columbia, who came to my office the day after graduation. He hadn’t taken my course, but he knew that I did personal strategy in it. He asks: Could he get my advice on finding a job? Sure. So he comes in. His name is David. We talk.

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I ask him what he has done so far to look for a job. Columbia organizes lots of recruiting events, where an executive from a big company gives a presentation to students in a classroom and then does a meet-and-greet with them afterward. David had gone to a few of those for big banks. But he didn’t pursue any leads. He had no interviews. None of the jobs appealed to him. He’s more or less starting from zero. So I ask him two questions: geography and field. First, geography: Does it matter where the job is located? “Funny you should ask,” he says. “I love Brazil, and I speak some Portuguese. I’d love to work in Brazil.” “OK,” I say. “Let’s find you a job in Brazil.” “But at an international salary,” he says. “Not a local salary.” He smiles a bit sheepishly. “I’m sorry, but it’s true.” “Fair enough,” I say. “I asked what you want, and you told me. Honest answers are best.” Next, field: What field does he want to work in? David laughs. “Like everyone else in my class—private equity.” I laugh too. Columbia is in New York City, so lots of our MBA students look to Wall Street for jobs. Private equity is a major new trend in the past decade or so: buying and selling stocks and bonds of companies that are private, that is, unlisted on any stock exchange. These companies tend to be smaller, riskier, and harder to analyze. Private equity is a “possible passion” for David in the sense that it was a hot topic in a field he wanted to work in. He did not have a more specific passion yet, like our figure skater, or future Minister of Finance, or Schultz after Milan. David was more like Schultz before Milan: with strong interests rather than active passions. In other words, “possible passions.” “All right,” I say. “Private equity in Brazil.”

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I explain the first step of Idea Networking, and tell him that he needs to come up with an idea in the form of a question that matches this possible passion. He sits there thinking. I tell him, “You don’t have to come up with one now. Usually it takes a few days.” He ignores me. He keeps thinking. After a few moments his eyes light up. “It’s easy,” he says. “Here’s the question: ‘Is there private equity in Brazil?’ What I mean is, how does it work, exactly?” Excellent! A great question for Idea Networking. Brazil’s economy has grown fast over the past decades, and is just now developing all the complicated institutions of business and finance that Western Europe and the United States developed much earlier. So David will ask if the boom in private equity in more developed economies has reached Brazil yet, and if so, how exactly does it work? For example, are there local private equity firms, with local money? Or do foreign private equity firms operate with foreign money? Where does the foreign money come from: the United States, Europe, other countries in Latin America? And so on. If you’re in the field of private equity, or you’re an investor in Brazil, this is an interesting question. It’s not too general, and it’s not too specific. These “idea questions” are very different from another traditional networking technique: the informational interview. That’s where you ask to speak to someone in a company not about a specific job, but about working there more generally. For an informational interview, David would ask this kind of question: Do private equity firms in Brazil hire Americans? What is it like to work in private equity in Brazil? How are the salaries and benefits? You can see right away that this kind of question is not at all interesting to the person you ask. And it shows that you’re not really interested in your idea—you’re just looking for a job.

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Here are two more bad questions for David: How many private equity firms are there in Brazil? Do you invest in private equity in Brazil? Once again, these questions are not interesting enough to the person he is asking, but even worse, they’re not open ended: the answer to the first one is just a number, and the answer to the second one is yes or no. Instead, you want a question that the person you asks finds interesting and leads to a lengthy discussion. So that’s the first step. For the second step, you find one person to ask the question. You want someone important or well-connected in the field, or both. Or you want someone who may know someone important or well-connected because that person will lead you to someone else like them, who will lead you to someone else, and so on through the field. Your aim here is not to have a flash of insight yourself. You’re looking for someone else to have one—to see you as a missing piece to a puzzle they are trying to solve. You cannot predict what puzzle exactly that might be. So you find a question that can lead to many possible puzzles, and ask it of people who might be working on one of those puzzles in some way. So David thinks back through his recruiting events. “There’s one guy,” he says. “From one of the big banks. I talked to him a bit. He might remember me.” Good. So David has his start. You only need one person. You can contact that person by email, phone, or—best of all—in person, depending on the situation. Introduce yourself briefly, but do not say you’re looking for a job. “I’m a student at (school name),” or “I work at (company name),” or “I work in (field),” is good enough. Then ask: Would they mind if you ask for their thoughts on a question you have about the field? If the question is interesting enough, they

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almost always say yes. They’re flattered that you recognize their expertise, and they think you’re smart for asking them. If you’re not sure that they actually know something about the topic, say so: “I’m not sure whether you deal with this specifically in your work, but if so . . .” Then you ask your question. At worst, they will say they don’t know about your subject. Then you can ask if they know someone who does. Then you ask that second person your question. You discuss the question with this person as long as they seem interested. At the end, say, “I know you’re very busy, so I don’t want to take up more of your time. Is there anyone you could suggest I talk to more about this?” You want three names, but just take whatever number you get. It might be zero, it might be ten. It’s almost always at least one. With each new person, do the same as with the first one. Revise your introduction accordingly: “I work at (company name) and (person’s name) thought I might ask you about . . .” In this way, one person leads to three others, who each lead to three more, and so on. Three, nine, twenty-seven—in no time, if your question is specific enough, you can talk to a good percentage of the people in the world who know something about it. If you already have a good contact, tailor your question to that person. If that takes you somewhat off track, that’s fine. Go where it leads. If you don’t know one person offhand, ask contacts you do have—alumni networks, friends, family, or work contacts—if they know someone who might know something about your puzzle. With each new person you talk to, your question grows more sophisticated, or becomes several questions that you pursue with different people. In each discussion, listen especially for examples from history of things that worked. Not because they might give you a flash of insight—although if that happens, all the better—but because passing them on to

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the next person you talk to is a way to highlight to them your seventh sense. If the field is new to you, it’s likely you’re not an expert yet—your sixth sense is weak. So you don’t want to discuss the details of the craft, because that will highlight how little you know about that. Discussing an example from history shows that you have ideas at a higher level—the level of the seventh sense. They might never have heard of the seventh sense, but they know it when they see it, and it will show that you’re thinking deeply about your question. In fact, once you reach a dozen people, you are probably more up to date than they are about that specific question, because they seldom talk to each other at such an intense pace. You can say, “That’s interesting. I wonder if you know that (person’s name) is working on (related topic).” After each new conversation, send an email back to the person who sent you to that new person, thanking them again and giving a tidbit from your new conversation. If someone asks why you’re interested in your topic, do not say, “Because I want a job in that field.” They’ll think you tricked them: you’re not really interested in your question. It was just a way in to get a job interview. So instead, tell them why you find the subject interesting— give specific reasons—and mention that you might want to work in that area at some point, depending on what you discover. You’re pursuing the idea, not a job, although you recognize it might eventually lead to a job. And that’s not a trick. It’s true. At some point, someone will say, “You seem to know quite a lot about this. I think X is looking for someone. . . .” Of course you say you’d be glad to talk to X. At worst, X becomes another interesting contact to talk to. At best, you have found a job: one you didn’t even know existed. Instead of a search for a specific job, Idea Networking is a treasure

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hunt for unforeseen opportunity. It takes advantage of the oral network that routinely fills positions above the starting level. With the world economy changing so rapidly, companies have to be nimble and many only post job openings after they find someone they think might fit the job. Idea Networking helps that someone be you. You can begin Idea Networking any time, long before you think you need a change from what you’re doing now. You control the pace: you can go fast or slow, and you can spend a lot of time or very little time on it during your ordinary work week. Remember that these conversations are not informational interviews. You are not asking the person about their company: you are asking what they think about your question and the puzzle it poses. You are not a job seeker: you are a fellow professional with a lively interest and ease with complex ideas in their field. Eventually it will dawn on someone that you’re the kind of person they or someone they know really needs in these difficult, complex times. They might think they’re looking for someone with a certain background, skills, or something else that appears on a résumé. But what they’re really looking for is something they don’t even realize, until they see it: someone with ideas. And that’s what you demonstrate right from the first. After I explained all this to David, he got started on this second step with his good question in hand. Six weeks later he phoned me, and the first thing he said was, “Twenty-six.” I thought for a moment. Oh! “I get it,” I replied. “The twenty-sixth person offered you a job.” Indeed. He had a job offer from a major international bank to do private equity research in Brazil, at an international salary.

121

Idea Networking

“But there’s one problem,” David continued. “The person I’ll be working for is a complete and total jerk.” “Oh,” I replied. “That’s too bad. Are you thinking of marrying him?” David laughed. He thought for a moment. “I get it,” he said. And he did get it. David took the job, and the moment he arrived in Brazil he started Idea Networking again. His question was more sophisticated this time, and it was easier to find people to ask because he already had a job in the field. Nine months later David called me again. A Brazilian private equity firm had offered him a job at an international salary. Done. In two steps, David found his way. In both cases—the international bank and the Brazilian firm—it was others who had the flash of insight. They did not seek David out, but when he appeared they realized he was a piece of a puzzle they were trying to solve. You need presence of mind yourself, to give up your narrow goal of finding a job and to pursue the more open goal of allowing the job to find you. And at least one person you meet has to have the presence of mind to shift from the goal of discussing your question to the goal of filling a job they know about. At first, the karma of the situation might seem overwhelming: there are so many obstacles to getting a job in Brazil that you don’t know where to start. Idea Networking is dharma that shows you how to find your way through the karma you face. You can also do Idea Networking on a smaller scale, as opportunity arises. Another student told me he recently met by chance the head of operations of a giant company, who ended by saying, “Come by my office sometime and we’ll chat some more.” It was one of the world’s biggest shipping companies. But the student told me, “I’m not interested in shipping operations. I’m interested in finance. So I never followed up.”

122

Idea Networking

I didn’t even have to open my mouth. Another student overheard, and answered for me: “Come up with a financial question about shipping operations.” Exactly. For example, “As head of operations, do you get involved in the financial planning to buy ships?” This is actually a complicated question, because each ship costs tens of millions of dollars and changes in resale value every few weeks as the world economy goes up and down. At the end of the conversation, as usual, when you ask the head of operations if there’s anyone else to talk to about this—perhaps the Chief Financial Officer is right down the hall . . . “Ah!” the first student exclaimed. “I get it.” He went off to follow up right away. Of course Idea Networking cannot guarantee success. But it improves your chances, and in all cases you learn a lot in a field you care about—or you learn enough to know that you don’t want to pursue it further. That education alone is worth the effort. Above all, don’t fear the unknown. Chance plays a big role in anyone’s life: What if Schultz hadn’t gone to Milan, or Gandhi to London, or Joan Affleck to Paris? You can’t predict what chance will bring you, but afterward it all makes sense. As the great philosopher Kierkegaard explains: Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

The way to live life forward is not to plan out your future in detail, but to pursue your interests and possible passions in a way that best puts you in the way of unforeseen opportunities. Even if you’re happy in your current job, Idea Networking can help you expand your horizons in new directions that you can decide to pursue or not, if you find a good way to do it sometime in the future. And it might not lead to a

123

Idea Networking

new job, but rather a new project in your current job, or an investor or partner in a new business idea. You can pursue more than one question at a time, in very different fields that follow your various possible passions, at your own pace and intensity. It’s a voyage of discovery, not a race to a set destination. You never know what shore you will land on, or what you will find there when you do. Along the way you can leak anxiety at every turn, or you can see the whole thing as a great adventure. The choice is up to you. We can see how Idea Networking follows from Free Your Mind and the Personal Strategy Map: they all help you seek, see, and seize opportunity that you cannot predict. Free Your Mind helps you shift your actions from impossible to possible goals— from what you “want” to what you “can do,” as da Vinci puts it. The Personal Strategy Map helps you identify the full range of possible goals that you might aim to achieve “with your greatest effort,” as Einstein tells us. Idea Networking helps you find stepping stones to one of those goals, in an unpredictable way that only makes sense “backwards,” as Kierkegaard says. The seventh sense guides you through all three methods. Examples from history show you possible actions you might take yourself, at least in part. Presence of mind lets you shift goals when you need to, and to see opportunity when it arises. The flash of insight connects a set of possible actions to a possible goal that fits one or more of your possible passions. Resolution gives you the courage to push ahead once you see a path forward, to solve problems and work out the details along the way. Let me end with one of my favorite examples of Idea Networking. It comes from an MBA student named Aparna Mukherjee, who was about to graduate. She had a good job lined up at the Wall Street Journal, where she had been their first-ever MBA intern. But print media was struggling, and

124

Idea Networking

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp was aiming to acquire the Journal, so they were only hiring new people for short-term projects until the deal went through. Meanwhile, a TV show came to campus: Mad Money, starring Jim Cramer. He gives advice on stocks in a frantic, entertaining style. The network, CNBC, filmed an episode of the show in a big classroom with students as the audience, and hosted a reception afterward. At one point at the reception, Aparna noticed Cramer alone in a corner, drinking his whiskey. So she thought of a question. What’s amazing to me is she did it so quickly, in just the time it took her to walk to Cramer’s corner. “Excuse me, Jim,” she said. “I’m graduating soon. I’ll be going to work on strategy for the Wall Street Journal. We have a big Internet presence, in addition to print. You have such a popular TV show, have you thought about CNBC doing more with your audience online?” Perfect! It’s a complicated question, with lots of angles, and of course Cramer had an opinion on every one of them. Aparna asked follow-up questions. He answered. It’s a huge and interesting topic, and of course one that mattered a lot for his show. Then someone else came over to listen to Cramer and Aparna, back and forth. He stood there for a while, and then barked at Aparna, “Who are you?” She blinked for a moment, then told him her name, and that she was graduating in just a few days. “You got a job?” he asked. “I think so,” she replied, and explained about the Wall Street Journal. “Aw, don’t work for them. Come work for us.” It was the President of the network, Mark Hoffman. Sure enough, he hired her.

125

10

Conclusion Your Seventh Sense

in 1903, thomas edison hired a young chemist, Martin Rosanoff, to work on improving the wax that Edison used for his phonograph cylinders. Years later, Rosanoff wrote about his many conversations with the great inventor, including the time he asked Edison why he was so successful. Edison replied: Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

Edison meant that you need two things to succeed: a tremendous amount of hard work—perspiration—and a good idea. Inspiration gives you that good idea. I agree with Edison completely. This book tells you how inspiration works and how you can help make it strike you more often. Inspiration is only one percent, but it’s the brains of the operation. Inspiration gives you the idea, and perspiration makes it happen. In both we see the seventh sense:

Conclusion

inspiration comes in a flash of insight, and perspiration is resolution. We even see the seventh sense in the word inspiration itself: it comes from Latin, and its original meaning was “breathe in,” the way respiration means “breathe again and again.” Breathe in: inspiration comes from the outside. You breathe it in—you take in examples from history—and they connect in your mind as a flash of insight. By Edison’s formula, you only need your seventh sense one percent of the time. For the other ninety-nine percent, you can rely on your other six senses. Think about your day: mostly you just repeat things you did before. You very rarely do something new. Even when you see a new movie, or read a new book, or meet a new person, you’re not actually doing something new—it’s the movie or book or person that’s different, not what you did. In everyday life, repeating the same actions again and again works fine ninety-nine percent of the time. You only need a new idea one percent of the time. But that’s a very important one percent. Your first six senses tell you who you are. Your seventh sense tells you who you can be. Over the next year, your time awake will total about 6,000 hours. One percent means you only need your seventh sense for sixty of those hours. But here’s the catch: we don’t know which hours those are. A flash of insight can happen at any time. The three tools I’ve shown you—Free Your Mind, the Personal Strategy Map, and Idea Networking—do take time to do well, but they will seldom add up to more than sixty hours. Each time you do it, Free Your Mind takes a few minutes, the Personal Strategy Map takes a few hours, and Idea Networking takes a few days. The seventh sense does not take up a lot of time. But that makes it easy to forget, as days and weeks and months go by when you might not use it at all.

127

Conclusion

Right now, at the end of this book, you know how your seventh sense works and how to do it better. But as soon as you put the book down, you return to your life as you lived it before. Day by day, the lessons in the book will fade. You might put the book within easy reach, to refer to as needed. But the hardest part is to remember that you need it. Routine takes over. You can go for weeks, for months, for years, without any new ideas for what to do with your life. You’ll have the feeling that something is missing, but you won’t know what it is. The best solution, of course, is perfect presence of mind, when your mind is so clear, even while you are working hard at various tasks, that you can see at once when the mix of your circumstances, your passions, and the examples from history stored in your memory call for your seventh sense. But that’s too much to ask of anyone. Instead I offer one last technique, just a small thing, and easy to do. It can serve as a simple reminder to trigger your seventh sense. Hold out one hand, palm up. On the other hand, hold out just your first two fingers, as when you signal to a waiter that there are two of you for dinner. Then touch those two fingers to the palm of your other hand. Five fingers on one hand, plus two fingers on the other. Five plus two equals seven. Oh. The seventh sense. It’s a reminder to yourself. No one else will even notice. Do it when: r
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128

Conclusion

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129

Conclusion

Mohandas Gandhi, Howard Schultz, Joan Affleck, Joan of Arc, Kary Mullis, Thomas Edison, and the many others I mention in these pages. But even these examples are not at all the main subject of this book. I’m not really talking about them. Who I’m really talking about is: You. I hope you see that the seventh sense is a normal function of the human mind. You’re human. You can do it to.

130

Appendix A

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WHO

Table A.4

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ŋŎŌ

Appendix B

Personal Strategy Maps

in my course at columbia, I do not ask students to do Free Your Mind and send it to me, because it is so personal: it’s an exercise you do not want to show to anyone else. I do not ask students to report on Idea Networking because they do that after the course is over. But I can show you some more Personal Strategy Maps. As I mentioned in chapter 8, the authors of all these Maps are my MBA students as they graduate from Columbia Business School. They come from many countries but they have much in common: they are all in their late twenties or early thirties, have done well academically and at work, and have the ambition, interest, and means to invest the time and money in an MBA degree. That makes them quite fortunate: they have more opportunity, and more control over their circumstances, than most other people in the world. You will see that the Map formats vary a bit, but the essential elements are always there: Possible Passions, Possible Goals, Actions and Obstacles, Unknown Future Stepping Stones.

Personal Strategy Maps

If your ambitions and circumstances are very different from my students, these Map examples can still help you by showing the steps of the exercise and offering specific ideas that you may find useful yourself, at least in part, in very different situations. The Map is most helpful at transitions: finishing a graduate degree, like these students, or finishing college, or thinking about changing your job, having a first child, or other circumstance that change your life. It’s a way to take stock of your aims and ideas about your personal strategy, not all the time but at key points—like crossing the border into a new country as you make your way across the continent of your life. Where to go next? Perhaps you already know, but perhaps in redoing your Map, somewhere else appears.

Straight-Edge, or Not So Straight? Shendi Wang For most of my life, I have been extremely straight-edge. I followed rules to the T, listened to what authority figures said, and set off on the path my parents set. I was afraid to deviate from prescribed rules. I thought something really bad would happen. So I functioned within these boundaries in every aspect of my life—I do not have any crazy stories to tell from my days of youth. My mom was a classic planner and therefore, so was I. I had a plan for everything. I would start studying for exams three weeks in advance, with the topics and number of chapters I would cover each day. I would do all the practice problems and master the concepts in the book to get a really good grade. If a tangent concept introduced itself in the context of my studying, I generally did not spend the time to read or learn about it; it was detracting from my

144

Personal Strategy Maps

plan. In my rigidity, I did not see things outside of my plan because I thought they were taking away value. I never considered that they could add value in ways I could not imagine or could not see at the moment. Another area of my life where planning was most pronounced is my career path. All I did in high school was study to get into a good college. I spent all of my time studying and doing Tae Kwon Do in college so that I could get a good job. Going to undergraduate business school at the University of Michigan and studying finance, the logical job to take was one in investment banking on Wall Street. Needless to say, that was what I did. When I reflect back on why I chose investment banking, I have no answer except that I felt it was the next step in my plan. I did not consider any other option. I was so focused on interviewing for top investment banks that I never thought about my reasons for doing so. I first started to open my mind to a different way of thinking as my second year in investment banking started drawing to a close. I knew I could not continue on and had to look for my next job. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I knew what I did not want to do—finance. Out of pure default, however, I began interviewing at private equity firms. This is what people did after investment banking. Not going this direction would be throwing away a lifetime of hard work and two years of suffering. Everyone around me was telling me that private equity was the next step and that it would open up opportunities. During this process, one of my best friends in investment banking was considering working for a start-up in San Francisco. Another friend told me in passing that I would really enjoy the West Coast; he had thought I was from there originally. I had been to the Bay Area a couple of times before and loved it. The idea of living there was an idealized image in my mind. The idea of working for a start-up in Silicon Valley was almost inconceivable. Not only would I be taking a huge pay-cut, but I would also be working for a company whose future was uncertain. I had never taken this kind of

145

Need CTO/ Attend as many NY Tech Meetups technical co-founder and events as possible within the entrepreneurial community

Need qualified, trustworthy, dedicated teachers

Build my own company

Open a Tae Kwon Do school

Tell as many people as possible about my idea and listen to their reaction

Contact my past masters from high school and college, and friends I used to train with to get recommendations

My ideas may not be scalable enough or provide enough value to receive funding or gain enough users

Being my own Generate a boss valuable idea that that I can make money on

STONES

STEPPING

FUTURE

POSSIBLE

Stretch more and practice basic drills at home

I haven’t trained seriously in three years, so I’m not still a seconddegree black belt

Tae Kwon Do

Join West Side Tae Kwon Do and begin training again

Become a psychologist

Need a PhD which takes ~7 years

Research top PhD programs and credentials needed to get in Apply to PhD programs

Develop deeper relationships with a select, diverse subset of all the people I meet so they will feel comfortable opening up to me

People may not want to talk to me or share certain things about themselves that would allow me to understand their underlying motivations

Understanding Talk to many people’s people in motivations different contexts and situations to get to know them UNKNOWN

Possible Goals

Possible Obstacles

Possible Actions

Possible Actions

Possible Actions

Possible Obstacles

Possible Passions

Table B.1

Become an expert in fields with which I am unfamiliar

Open a restaurant

Need a lot of time to gain such depth of knowledge in anything I don’t have any industry knowledge

A lot of large Start a nonprofit that and small organizations mentors kids already exist

Set aside one hour every day to read

Start asking to speak to people in my network if they can introduce me to anyone in the industry Come up with a better business model that combines the strengths and rids the weaknesses

Find some free online structured tutorials and/ or take formal classes Ask friends from different countries to give me free cooking lessons

Ask CBS people who mentor kids if anyone wants to start a better program

Some of these skills are very difficult to learn by myself

Cooking lessons are very expensive

No existing organization may fit the type of mentoring I want

Learn new skills to help me in other passions (a programming language?)

Learn to cook many types of dishes and cuisines

Stay active in a mentoring organization after CBS

Intellectual challenges/ stimulation

Food!

Mentoring kids

Work/live in a foreign country for a few years

I would be far away from my parents

Ask my parents to move there with me

Join different meetups and hang out with different people

Where do I find these things?

Exploring new Do things things I normally don’t do

Personal Strategy Maps

risk before, never veered so far off plan. Once I had gotten offers in San Francisco from both a start-up in Silicon Valley as well as a wealth management firm, the choice became real. I flew out and visited both companies. I knew much less structure existed at the start-up, but began thinking that this was a great opportunity to take at this point in my life. If I was going to go off-plan, the timing should be now. I do not know what gave me the courage to take the start-up job, but I did. I did this against my parents’ wishes and against the advice that most of my friends and colleagues had given me. I ended up getting laid off 10 months later, but I am certain that I would not have gotten here to Columbia Business School had I taken the wealth management job. My experience at the start-up opened my eyes to a whole other world of skills, people, and ways of doing things. The West Coast mindset influenced my own mindset. I became a little more flexible, understanding that plans change. I discovered that exploring avenues that seemed to divert from my plan could in fact prove to be more valuable than the plan itself. Spending time on these “tangents” led me to new things. My time at business school has further aided in my movement toward becoming more flexible and strategic. Things change much too fast to be stuck to a plan. My exposure to the tech community in New York solidified my desire to embrace Napoleon’s view: “I never truly was my own master but was always ruled by circumstances.” The entrepreneurial spirit and thinking of my best friend at CBS accelerated my appreciation for strategic intuition. This course was a great experience and another inspiration for my transformation from being straight-edge to not so straight.

148

Personal Strategy Maps

Liberation John Burroughs Although I came to business school to explore options, I did not expect that I would want to completely recalibrate my professional life after beginning my MBA. I expected that I would come to Columbia to pursue a career in consulting, and that I would be able to choose from various types of consultancies. During my first year, for reasons I can’t explain, the thought of being a generalist advisor living out of a suitcase became nauseating. I started to truly question myself, my professional decisions and my desire to attend business school. I felt reckless and rudderless. In a three-month period in 2012, I quit my job, turned away from a lucrative career in the defense industry, got married, traveled to Rome for a honeymoon and took on debt to attend one of the most expensive business schools in the world with people I perceived to be much smarter than I. Was I manic? Was I an irresponsible husband to my new wife who also left her career to move to New York? Suddenly, what I had thought was a “no brainer” next step in my professional development became a questionable decision in my mind. In my application to Columbia, I asserted, “A Columbia MBA is the vital next step in my career—it will enrich my skill set and enhance my value as a management consultant.” The Columbia experience did indeed become a vital experience for me, but not for reasons I could have predicted and not in the manner I had expected. Once a career as a generalist became less and less interesting to me, I started to explore my options and open my mind to known and unknown possibilities. But “opening my mind” in this way did not come naturally for me. Moreover, the possibilities that I started to explore were contradictory in nature, which contributed to a feeling of unease. I eventually started to fear the question, “What will you be doing after business school?” I felt

149

Find work that allows me to focus on some element of EM/FM Partner with another writer/ thought leader and start a publication or blog

Not much Work for finance a larger company that experience has a robust EM division

The space Write about becomes too any subject that interests “crowded” me—just start

Writing/Big Picture

UNKNOWN

STONES

STEPPING

FUTURE

POSSIBLE

Manage a fund or start an advisory services firm for EM/FM investments Start a publication that focuses on growth/ frontier markets or write a book Too much time to produce quality work Start contributing to journals to see if anything sticks

Stay with family as much as possible and don’t move around

Possible Goals

May be too specific to find a meaningful job with a good salary

Not making enough to pay off debt

Possible Obstacles

Work for a PE firm overseas, preferably in Africa or Eastern Europe

Work at a place that does not require 24/7 commitment

Start a business that allows me to stay at home

Frontier and Emerging Markets (EM/FM)

My wife wants to stay at home, in which case a small business could bring more risk

Start a family business

Possible Actions

Possible Actions

Family

Possible Obstacles

Possible Actions

Possible Passions

Table B.2

Incorporate new technologies into private aviation at relatively low cost Become a trusted expert for the State Department, military or Congress for EM issues

Having the time to stay current with new trends in aviation

Start a firm that meets needs of growing aviation market in Africa Not spending Leverage a career in network in government DC to attend conferences or events relating to frontier market business and investment

Learn about private U.S. aviation businesses with overseas clients

Work for the IFC or OPIC

The aviation market doesn’t grow and evolve/ private aviation industry stagnates

Wife may not be able to leave job in New York

Continue to fly as a hobby and stay attuned to aviation trends

Work exclusively for a congressman or senator

Flying

U.S. Government/ Foreign Affairs/ International Travel

Personal Strategy Maps

pressure to hide the fact that I was throwing myself out there and seeing what sticks. This course gave me profound insight into the nature of success and happiness. It liberated me from the tendency to look for answers in personality and aptitude tests. It reminded me that it’s okay to have various interests that do not align with a preordained professional path. This class helped me see Walt Whitman’s words in a new light, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then I contradict myself. / I am large. I contain multitudes.” I had read “Song of Myself” before, but it had never resonated. Now I see Whitman’s work through a different lens. Instead looking at business school as a stepping stone, I embraced it as my wild turn. I attended this class at just the right time in my life. Remarkably, this course even helped me understand my military experience and to identify the unrealistic expectations I had for myself and my career. After using the Personal Strategy Map, I felt more empowered, as I could see that I still have many options, that I have quite a bit of relevant experience and that “aha” moments are still possible for me! I have wanted to pursue a career in which I could leverage my international and U.S. Government experience while also focusing on frontier market investing. I also enjoy writing, which is something that I have rarely spoken about at business school. Filling out the Personal Strategy Map was actually a great exercise for me, as I started to think big and allow myself to have real ideas. It showed me that I can walk toward my goal while looking for options, I can reverse course completely and walk away from my goal, or I can find an entirely new goal that suits me. In the past, I would have labeled these types of behavior as distracting or flaky. Now, they are essential. I’m grateful for this class. It has helped me to see the Jomini habits that were formed while I was in uniform and it helped me to understand the importance of maintaining a presence of mind and embracing the spiritual elements behind

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coup d’oeil. Also, this course revealed to me a simple truth that is surprisingly elusive: my past ideas did not come from me, nor will future ideas come from me—they came and will come through examples from history. Once I was able to truly see this, it was as if I turned on a faucet in my mind through which ideas began to flow.

My Next Base Mark Santangelo I entered Columbia as a dual-degree student between the business school and the international affairs school. The program would take me out of the workforce for three years, cost me an extra year’s worth of tuition and potentially leave me with no stronger understanding of where I was headed then when I entered in 2011. My pursuit of the program was driven by general interests (and little to no work experience) in emerging markets, economic development, an international career and the energy industry. My previous career, as an accountant and M&A advisor, provided me with tangible skills, but left me feeling like I could make a much bigger impact on the world. However, whenever I would attempt to define “impact” it was difficult. I dreamt of working in Africa at an NGO—using my business acumen to solve serious problems and lift people out of poverty. I also dreamt of working at a for-profit investment fund that accomplished two goals: creating a return for investors and providing entrepreneurial individuals in emerging markets with capital they couldn’t get elsewhere. My mind would jump from one (vague) idea to the next. In another instance, I had identified energy markets as a topic I enjoyed reading about and a major impediment to further economic development in hard to reach markets.

153

Limited slots and three years is a long time to wait

Responsibilities ??????? to wife/kids, ??????? need to make steady income

Request transfer at GE EFS after three years

Find company that has sabbaticals, switch jobs frequently

Working in Emerging Markets

International Travel

Develop relationship with executives in offices of interest

Push GE EFS to place you on renewable investments

Work as solar/ No renewable wind operator energy experience, risky business model

Possible Actions

Renewable Energy

Possible Obstacles

Possible Actions

Possible Passions

Table B.3

STONES

STEPPING

FUTURE

POSSIBLE

UNKNOWN

Develop contacts at GE EFS, attempt to find projects or do research

Few opportunities, need to have network in country of interest

Competing with local talent, funds need few employees

Industry growth dependent on commodity prices and gov’t action

??????? ????????

Understand type of energy deals that they will focus on and get relevant experience at GE

Possible Obstacles

Possible Actions

U.S.-based job where majority of investments are overseas

Private equity fund in East Africa

Executive at renewable energy company

Possible Goals

Government Work

Find finance role in energy department

BE VP/ Convincing my Finance at wife to move, growing social likely low pay enterprise

Social Enterprise employee

How many roles like this exist?

Difficult to implement business plan from 5k miles away

Start business in NYC area: services to emerging market from the United States

Social Enterprise start-up

Time commitment will interfere with family/life responsibilities

GEEFS = strong PE energy network, meet everyone

Private Equity (Energyfocused)

Network, meet people, understand international opportunities

Lay out tangible timeline and expected living situation for wife

Create in-country network, hire local staff, travel frequently

Choose higher paying job, outsource more household duties

Master Spanish

Save diligently, understand fallback plan

Save diligently, understand fallback plan, emphasize benefit for our kids

Seek out PE funds that do renewable or emerging market investing

Leverage energy resume to join renewable business in Africa

Start business that provides new product/ service in Africa

Continue along current path

Need to speak Work at multiple World Bank languages

Are there many businesses? Pay is likely well below current salary

The idea, convincing my family to move overseas with no guaranteed salary

I get bored easily, not driven by money

Personal Strategy Maps

Now heading into my final semester at Columbia, I have had the opportunity to work at an advisory group in Nairobi and an energy company in Houston. I am also married and need to balance the interests of my wife (and, eventually, family) with those of my own. My only explicit goal heading into graduate school was to work abroad. Now, in my final year, I have a full-time job at a company that directly invests in energy projects (an even mix of oil & gas, power generation, and renewable energy). The job, in many ways, is perfect, except that it is Stamford, Connecticut—a far cry from Africa or any emerging market for that matter. In one breath, I feel that I have failed. To quote my fatherin-law: Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail. I see the postponement of an international, and hopefully impactful, career as a sure sign that I am resigned to my fate in Northeastern suburbia. In another breath, I look back at a couple of great summer experiences, coupled with a great job in energy investing postMBA, and feel I am well positioned to do whatever I choose. Thus, this class, and the concept of a “wild turn” came at the perfect time. In some ways it feels like a justification of my “failure to plan.” But, more relevantly, it helps me understand that coming back to school has allowed me to add to my examples from history (through classes, exposure to like-minded people, and my summer internships) that I can hopefully draw upon as I hit another inflection point in a few years. This class has also taught me that I should not limit myself to an “inflection point,” but rather I should retain presence of mind so that I can spot an opportunity or “aha moment” when it strikes. My personal strategy map, on the last page of this document, highlights my desire to work abroad, have an impact on economic development in emerging markets and, potentially, achieve these goals within the energy industry. My life feels like it has taken a wild turn, in that I’ve gotten married, am moving to the suburbs and am working for a corporate behemoth (again). Before taking this class it would have been

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easy to view these events as the end of a dream. However, having drawn up my personal strategy map (and, shared it with my wife!), this class has shown me that I must understand what I think I want and be open to ways to obtain it or seize potential new opportunities. The martial arts example from class seems especially poignant. The manner in which the individual feels his way, finds his base, and then begins to feel for the next base appears to apply to my current situation. My first job out of MBA is now my base, it will provide me with experience and contacts within the energy industry, and from there it is up to me to feel for my next base. To draw on the idea-focused networking examples from class, I can speak on energy; it is up to me to talk to people who are doing interesting things with energy investing in emerging markets. From there, I will fill holes in my personal strategy map and begin to paint a clearer picture of where my next base might be.

From Panic to Strategy Filipa Castro Everyone comes to Columbia Business School thinking they will figure it all out. While some people actually figure at least something out, others start panicking. I am one of the latter! When I came to business school, the only thing I was sure about was that I was not going back to my previous job. I committed long before coming that this experience was only worth it if it led to a change. But I did not even know what I did not like about being a consultant. I mean, I had a good speech for it but I did not believe in it 100 percent. Throughout the MBA I played every role. I wanted to be in health care. Then I wanted to work in marketing. Right after,

157

Having the money to do a PhD right after finishing an MBA; uncertainty on how I would react to researching 80% of my time

No U.S. visa; also no previous background in Finance which makes me behind many other candidates

Finish my PhD in Economics (or change to Finance)

Take advantage of CBS network, and the postMBA demand to find a job in this area

Teach/Finance

Use classes at CBS to learn as much as possible and try to sell other types of expertise I acquired in my previous job

Work before, in a role that requires intense research to both earn some money and assess real passion for research; assess the possibility of being a practitioner

Work first in a different business, and save for later days as an entrepreneur

A sector where monetary compensation is typically small (pay off my MBA)

Start looking at successful businesses in the field (gather examples from history)

Social sector/ Education

Possible Actions

Possible Obstacles

Possible Actions

Possible Passions

Table B.4

STONES

STEPPING

FUTURE

POSSIBLE

UNKNOWN

Focus on fields with a more balanced lifestyle; design a strategy at home that maximizes free time (delegate cleaning, school pickups, etc.)

Be flexible in terms of location or field; smart choices for topics of research, maybe going for a second-best subject in favor of higher chances of success

Leverage CBS community to build a sound business model (classes like Launching Social Ventures)

Possible Actions

Launch a successful social enterprise in the Education Sector

Possible Goals

Life style incompatible with my aspirations as mother and wife

Work in a big bank on Wall Street

No luck at all in Be a tenured the job market; professor in choosing a field Finance that is not “hot” and where in the end there is not much place for me (theoretical vs. empirical)

Get a good idea; raise funds, convince investors about soundness of business

Possible Obstacles

Choose a daily occupation that gives enough free time to dedicate to the family

Start being involved with the sector either by seeking a job in the area or volunteering in a hospital

Motherhood

Health care (provider side)

Not an easy industry of an international student to step into (visa sponsorship is hard); lack of extra time to devote to volunteering

A job might not exist that is challenging enough and still leaves enough time for family

Start husband green card process; focus on big firms in the sector (pharma a second best?); find whatever job gives enough time to do outside activities; work in a place that requires interaction with healthcare stakeholders (banking/ consulting)

Deeper due diligence and talk with other mothers who were able to have it all

Find a job in health care in the United States; start investing in building the network whenever I’m back home (Christmas, summer vacation)

Research side activities I could do while staying at home (computer programming course, Photoshop workshop, hospital volunteer) No background in health care; family issues make me stay in the U.S. for the short term, hence hard to start building a career in Portugal in this field or building an adequate network

Get bored with no job, no problem-solving during the day

Run my own hospital back in Portugal

Be a stay-athome mom

Personal Strategy Maps

education was my main area of interest. . . . Oh, wait! I also wanted to do investment banking at some point. Later in the semester, I thought I was made to be a professor! I wanted to stay my whole summer being a research assistant in capital markets. How about going to Mexico to work for a start-up company? I spent a lot of time beating myself up for being like that. I thought there was something wrong with me. For some people, everything looks so clear. And things look so sticky to others. My friends that came to do real estate, a year and a half later, that is still what they are looking for. Classmates that had consulting in mind will be doing it after school. My investment banker friends: exact same story. What is wrong with me? This class was particularly interesting for me, and this personal strategy map exercise, more than any other, helped me put some perspective on things. So, I have multiple interests! Sure, in a way one may argue that this makes things complicated. It is harder to set the first goal to follow and it makes it tough to not get “wrongly” distracted along the way. What if things don’t work out? In life, more than we can imagine is Karma’s responsibility, hence things you cannot control. So being able to access multiple interest and goals can in fact be a good thing! It means flexibility. While building this personal strategy map, I understood that what I previously thought was “lack of focus” ended up being just having more than one passion and motivation. Knowing this is the most powerful tool on my side. I just need to make sure I truly know the different things that (today) excite me, understand what potential goals can come from them, obstacles I might have, how can I bypass them, realize that there might be other combinations of passions that lead to different possible goals (I had not thought about before) and most of all, be flexible enough to change all that whenever my presence of mind generate flashes of insight! There is something big along the way of our passions and our possible

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goals: UNKOWN POSSIBLE FUTURE STEPPING STONES. Things I will not control will most likely direct my future and I need to have the humbleness to accept that. Though realizing that it is very good to have all these different realities in my head, all based on different passion or combinations of passions inside me, I questioned at some point if I would be able to keep the balance of picking one goal and only changing when it makes sense, instead of keep being constantly tempted by the ones I left behind. I know it is a matter of Dharma. For me to have the good flashes of insight along the way, I need presence of mind, and managing my emotions is part of getting this “calmness.” I cannot let anxiety, low self-esteem or stress to misguide me in this journey. Mindfulness can be controlled. Emotions are not innate. And again, there are extremely useful techniques and studies in this area (practice meditation or yoga are just one of the examples). While right now, possible goal number 3 is the one I am seeking, I know that this path is flexible and that there is a lot along the way I cannot control. And I can be mistaken. My goals and passions can change 100 percent. I need to be fully aware and prepared for that.

161

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167

Index

adrenaline, 76–77 Affleck, Joan, 43, 55, 74, 129; background of, 44; CRUISE and, 45–46; flash of insight of, 44–45 analysis: creativity and insight compared to, 51; insight compared to, 48–49; intuition and studies on, 49 Anderson, George, 69–70 apartheid, 30 Arabica coffee, 9, 14, 65 The Art of Happiness (Cutler and Dalai Lama), 79 Asian philosophy, on negative emotions, 78–79 Aurelius, Marcus, 86 babies, work changes with, 104–5, 106–7

Bacon, Roger, 57 bias: examples from history and, 27–28; politics and, 28; success and, 29–30 Blink (Gladwell), 3 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 67, 148 brain: blocked, 77; conceptual reorganization in, 51; cortisol released in, 76–77; déjà vu and, 3; flash of insight preparation for, 6, 11; modern science of, 1; presence of mind assisting, 41; senses and, 1–2; task shifting in, 74. See also relaxed brain brain scans: flash of insight studied with, 47–49; seventh sense impossibility for, 50, 52 brainstorming, 54–55 Bryant, Kobe, 39–40

Index

Brynjolfsson, Erik, 12 Buddhism, 79, 81, 91–92 Burroughs, John, 149, 150–51, 152–53 business school, fear and, 157 Castro, Filipa, 157, 158–59, 160–61 change of goals: conflict causing, 37; after flash of insight, 37–38; Free Your Mind and, 89–90; Gandhi and, 36; pregnancy and, 104–5, 106–7; presence of mind and, 35–37; Schultz and, 36; seventh sense and, 36 Chano, Junko, 69 Churchill, Winston, 31 Clausewitz, Carl von, 17, 18, 69, 70; on coup d’oeil, 67–68; military strategy of, 13, 22; on presence of mind, 16 CNBC, 125 coffee, 8, 14–15, 65; Arabica compared to Robusta, 9; Italian consumption of, 9–10; successful businesses in, 22–23 cognitive-behavioral therapy, 78 communicating ideas, 59–62 conceptual reorganization, 51 conflict, 131, 131 Content Re-Use Information System for Electronic Documents (CRUISE), 45–46 cortisol, 76–77 coup d’oeil, 67–68, 104–5 Cramer, Jim, 125 creativity: analysis compared to insight and, 51; brainstorming

and, 54–55; conceptual reorganization and, 51; deep, 53–54; environment influencing, 52; importance of, 56; insight as, 50–51; magic and mystery of, 56–58; presence of mind and, 42; scientific understanding of, 55; of seventh sense, 52; shallow, 53–54; standardized tests for, 54; Stefani on, 56. See also flash of insight criticism, 61–62 CRUISE. See Content Re-Use Information System for Electronic Documents Cutler, Howard, 79 Dalai Lama, 78; activities of, 91–92; environmental protection project of, 48, 91; on negative emotions, 79, 86 dating, networking compared to, 113 Davidson, Richard, 78 da Vinci, Leonardo, 95–96 deep creativity, 53–54 déjà vu, brain and, 3 desires, negative emotions and, 91–92 dharma, 161; actions for, 82–84, 89–90; assessing, 86–87; Idea Networking as, 122; ideas from, 83–84; impossibilities and, 102; karma faced with, 95–96; meaning of, 81; optimism and pessimism with, 91; in other traditions, 85; passion and, 95–97; past sorrow and future worry

170

Index

element, 13–16; studying, 23–24; triangulation for, 26–28; unexpected, 30 expert intuition, 68

exercise with, 133, 134; pursuing, 99. See also karma dieting success, 24–26 distraction: excess, 75; as presence of mind obstacle, 73–75; smart phones and, 74–75, 129 economic crisis, networking and, 112–13 Edison, Thomas, 113–14, 126–27, 129 Einstein, Albert, 96, 124 employment, from Idea Networking, 120–21 encouragement, for ideas, 64 Epictetus, 85 epiphany, 1; preparation for, 4–5, 6; from presence of mind, 17; of Schultz, 10, 14; varieties of, 6. See also flash of insight; seventh sense The Eureka Factor (Jung-Beeman and Kounios), 48 Eureka moment. See seventh sense examples from history, 38, 96, 124; applying, 23; bias and, 27–28; of dieting success, 24–26; failures in, 28–30; flash of insight and, 13–14; of Ford, 24; Gandhi and, 30–32; information compared to, 26; Internet searching for, 24, 83; memory and, 26; in other fields, 39; presence of mind and, 25, 34–35; Schultz and, 14–16, 22–23; searching for, 24–25; as seventh sense

failures: in examples from history, 28–30; of Gandhi, 30; intuition and, 3–4, 29; overreaching and, 96; planning and, 156; Schultz learning from, 29; seventh sense and, 29 fear: business school and, 157; Idea Networking facing, 123; of negative emotions, 75; of seventh sense, 63 Fertig, Michelle, 104–5, 106–7, 108–9, 110–11 five senses. See senses flash of insight, 2, 4, 96, 124, 161; of Affleck, 44–45; brain preparation for, 6, 11; brain scans studying, 47–49; change of goals after, 37–38; coup d’oeil and, 68; examples from history and, 13–14; of Gandhi, 32; insight compared to, 49–50; magic and mystery of, 47, 56–58; as obvious, 18, 27, 50–51; personal path of, 21; preparation for, 6; rare accounts of, 10–11; resolution from, 20–21; of Schultz, 17–18, 49–50; secondary, 19, 63; as seventh sense element, 17–18; unpredictability of, 127; from well-connected person, 118, 122. See also creativity; seventh sense

171

Index

focus, as presence of mind obstacle, 72–73 Ford, Henry, 24 Ford Foundation, 65–67 Free Your Mind: accomplishment with, 91; “Actions” step of, 82–85; change of goals for, 89–90; conflict and, 131, 131; “Dharma/Karma” step of, 81–82; instructions for, 131, 132, 133, 134; karma conflict eliminated with, 92–93; “Past/Future” step of, 80–81; personal nature of, 143; practicing, 85–87; “Problem” step of, 80; purpose of, 131; relaxed brain with, 104; seventh sense guiding, 124; seventh sense improvement with, 79; as strategy, 91; struggles with, 87–88; time needed for, 127 future worry, 81, 84, 88–89; exercise for, 133, 134 Gandhi, Mohandas, 54, 62, 72–73, 129; change of goals and, 36; emotional motivations of, 43; examples from history used by, 30–32; failures of, 30; flash of insight of, 32; presence of mind and, 32, 38–39, 41–42 General Electric, 69–70 Gladwell, Malcolm, 3 goals. See change of goals; possible goals Great Depression, 28 Greenburg, Scott, 19, 27, 38

Hinduism, 81, 91 history examples. See examples from history Hoffman, Mark, 125 Holson, Laura, 112–13 humanistic therapy, 78 Idea Networking, 112; beginning, 121; as dharma, 122; employment and work from, 120–21; evolving, 122; examples of, 124–25; expansion of horizons through, 123–24; fear faced with, 123; idea questions for, 114–17, 139; instructions for, 139–40, 141, 142; multiple paths through, 124; networking compared to, 114; opportunities from, 115; presence of mind for, 122; seventh sense guiding, 124; on small scale, 122–23; success through, 123; table organizing, 141, 142; time needed for, 127; unforeseen opportunity from, 120–21, 139; well-connected person for, 118–20, 139 idea questions: discussion prompted by, 118; evolving, 122; examples of, 116–17; for Idea Networking, 114–17, 139; informational interview compared to, 117–18, 121, 140; multiple, 124; numbers networking and, 115; Personal Strategy Maps for, 115; in traditional

172

Index

networking, 115; for wellconnected person, 119–20 ideas: audience concerns for, 60; birth of, 11; brainstorming and, 54–55; communicating, 59–62; criticism for, 61–62; from dharma, 83–84; encouragement for, 64; formation of, 1; improvement of, 62–63; from intuition, 7; jealousy and, 42; judgment of, 60–61; matrix method for, 70; old compared to new, 18; passion for improving, 62; as personal, 40–42; in pieces, 60; presence of mind and alteration of, 39; presence of mind and presentation of, 41; relaxed brain and, 11–12; from senses, 6–7; from seventh sense, 7; seventh sense birthing, 4, 16; strategy and new, 13; support for, 59; timing for acting on, 64 iDisorder (Rosen), 75 important person. See wellconnected person impossibilities, dharma and, 102 information, examples from history compared to, 26 informational interview, idea questions compared to, 117– 18, 121, 140 innovation, 66 insight: analysis compared to, 48–49; as creativity, 50–51; creativity and analysis compared to, 51; flash of insight compared to, 49–50;

intuition and studies on, 49; in relaxed brain, 49. See also flash of insight inspiration, seventh sense and, 126–27 Internet: examples from history on, 24, 83; networking and, 113 intuition: analysis and insight studies applied to, 49; conceptual reorganization and, 51; expert, 68; failures and, 3–4, 29; as hindrance, 15; ideas from, 7; memory and, 2–3; in new field, 120; presence of mind element of, 34; of Schultz, 14–15; science of, 68, 70; seventh sense compared to, 5–6, 15; shallow creativity and, 54; sports use of seventh sense and, 15, 40 investment banking, 145, 160 Italy, 8–10 James, Charles, 66–67 jealousy, ideas and, 42 Joan of Arc, 57–58, 129 jobs, from Idea Networking, 120–21 Jobs, Steve, 42 Jung-Beeman, Mark, 48–52, 54–55 Kahneman, Daniel, 3 Kandel, Eric, 2, 11 karma: accepting, 85, 89, 92; actions for, 84–85; assessing, 86–87; dharma chosen from facing, 95–96; Free Your

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karma (continued) Mind eliminating conflict with, 92–93; as future worry, 84; meaning of, 81; optimism and pessimism with, 91; in other traditions, 85; as overwhelming, 122; passion and, 95–97; as past sorrow, 84; past sorrow and future worry exercise with, 133, 134. See also dharma Kerr, Steve, 69–70 Kierkegaard, Søren, 123 Klein, Gary, 3, 68 Kosman, Sonja, 113 Kounios, John, 48–52, 54–55 Latimer, Lewis, 114 learning, 11; by example, 14; mechanism of, 69; process of, 2 learning organization, 69 long-term actions, 100–101 Mad Money, 125 martial arts, presence of mind and, 69, 157 matrix method, for ideas, 70 McAfee, Andrew, 12 meditation, presence of mind and, 69 memory: cortisol blocking, 77; examples from history and, 26; intuition and, 2–3; senses and, 2, 11; smell and, 2 military strategy: of Clausewitz, 13, 22; origins of, 66–67; personal strategy birthed from, 13; tradition of, 13

Milton, John, 76 Mind & Life Institute, 78 Mintzberg, Henry, 68–69 mobile devices, 74, 129 Mukherjee, Aparna, 124–25 Mullis, Kary, 12, 17, 129 multitasking, 74–75. See also distraction Murdoch, Rupert, 125 negative emotions: Asian philosophy on, 78–79; causes of, 87; cortisol released by, 76–77; Dalai Lama on, 79, 86; desires and, 91–92; fear of, 75; forms of, 75; health impact of, 76–77; as presence of mind obstacle, 42–43, 75–79; reducing, 77–78; Western psychology on, 78. See also Free Your Mind; stress Nehru, Jawaharlal, 42 networking: dating compared to, 113; economic crisis and, 112–13; Idea Networking compared to, 114; idea questions in traditional, 115; informational interview and, 117–18; Internet and, 113; numbers, 113–15; traditional method of, 112–14; wellconnected person expanding, 119, 140. See also Idea Networking New Deal, 28 News Corp, 125 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 85 numbers networking, 113–15

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Index

On War (Clausewitz), 13, 67 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 30–31, 38, 62, 72 Paradise Lost (Milton), 76 passions, 18–19; conflicting, 94–95; following, 94; for idea improvement, 62; karma and dharma in following, 95–97; possible, 98, 116–17, 135; seventh sense for following, 95–96 past sorrow, 81, 84, 89; exercise for, 133, 134 Patel, Sardar, 42 patience: presence of mind and, 101; resolution and, 64 Peet’s Coffee and Tea, 15 personal strategy: changing path for, 87–88; military strategy leading to, 13; work including, 5 Personal Strategy Maps: of Burroughs, 149, 150–51, 152–53; of Castro, 157, 158– 59, 160–61; commonalities with, 143; components of, 97; elements of, 143–44; empowerment from, 152; evaluating, 105; examples of, 103–11, 144–61; of Fertig, 104–5, 106–7, 108–9, 110–11; formats of, 143; frequency of, 135; for idea questions, 115; instructions for, 97–98, 135, 136–37, 138; “Obstacles and Actions” step of, 100–101, 136–37, 138; personal transitions and, 103, 144; for

perspective, 160; possibilities compared to decisions with, 101; “Possible Future Stepping Stones” step of, 101–2, 136–37, 138; “Possible Goals” step of, 98–100, 136–37, 138; “Possible Passions” step for, 98, 135, 136–37; pregnancy and, 104–5, 106–7; reflecting back on, 108–9, 110–11, 135; relaxed brain with, 104; of Santangelo, 153, 154–55, 156–57; seventh sense guiding, 124; time needed for, 127; updating, 101–2; of Wang, 144–45, 146–47, 148 personal transitions, Personal Strategy Maps and, 103, 144 perspective, Personal Strategy Maps for, 160 Poggio, John, 54 politics, bias and, 28 positive psychology, 78 possible actions, 100–101, 136– 37, 138 possible goals, 98–100, 104–5, 108, 124, 138 possible obstacles, 100–101, 136–37, 138 possible passions, 98, 116–17, 135 Pour Your Heart Into It (Schultz), 10 pregnancy, change of goals and, 104–5, 106–7 presence of mind, 96, 124, 161; achieving, 40; brain assisted by, 41; Bryant and, 39–40; change of goals and, 35–37; Clausewitz on, 16; cortisol

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Index

presence of mind (continued) preventing, 77; creativity and, 42; distraction as obstacle to, 73–75; epiphany from, 17; examples from history and, 25, 34–35; focus obstacle to, 72–73; Gandhi and, 32, 38–39, 41–42; idea alteration and, 39; for Idea Networking, 122; idea presentation and, 41; importance of, 33, 128; as intuition element, 34; martial arts and, 69, 157; meditation and, 69; negative emotions as obstacle to, 42–43, 75–79; patience and, 101; positive emotions assisting, 43; of Schultz, 16–17, 33–34; as seventh sense element, 16–17, 33–34; sports and, 39–40; subgoals and, 37–38; success acknowledged with, 41; sustaining, 40; time for, 73 pressure, 76 Rahinel, Ryan, 52 Redden, Joseph, 52 relaxed brain: ideas and, 11–12; insight in, 49; with Personal Strategy Maps and Free Your Mind, 104 resolution, 96–97, 124; audience concerns for, 60; communicating ideas for, 59–62; courage of, 20; criticism for, 61–62; duration of, 59; elements of, 18; encouragement for, 64; from flash of insight, 20–21; idea

improvement for, 62–63; partial, 65; patience and, 64; of Schultz, 18–21; as seventh sense element, 18–21; shortterm and long-term actions for, 100–101 Robusta coffee, 9 Roosevelt, Theodore, 28 Rosanoff, Martin, 126 Rosen, Larry, 75 Sanofi US, 44–46 Sanskrit language, 81 Santangelo, Mark, 153, 154–55, 156–57 Schultz, Howard, 27, 54, 65, 72–74, 129; change of goals and, 36; courage of, 20; emotional motivations of, 43; epiphany of, 10, 14; examples from history and, 14–16, 22–23; failure lessons for, 29; flash of insight of, 17–18, 49–50; intuition of, 14–15; Italy trip of, 8–10; presence of mind of, 16–17, 33–34; resolution of, 18–21; seventh sense steps of, 21 science of intuition, 68, 70 SCM. See Structured Content Management secondary flash of insight, 19, 63 The Second Machine Age (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 12 senses: brain and, 1–2; ideas from, 6–7; memory and, 2, 11. See also intuition; seventh sense Serenity Prayer (Niebuhr), 85 seven-finger sign, 128–29

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Index

seventh sense, 1; accounts of, 10–12; brain scan impossibility of, 50, 52; change of goals and, 36; as circular, 102; creativity of, 52; deep creativity and, 53; discovery of, 65–71; elements of, 11, 13, 96–97; examples from history as element of, 13–16; failures and, 29; fear of, 63; flash of insight as element of, 17–18; Free Your Mind guided by, 124; Free Your Mind improving, 79; Idea Networking guided by, 124; ideas from, 4, 7, 16; ignoring, 127–28; impossibilities prevented with, 102; improving, 4–5; inspiration and, 126–27; intuition compared to, 5–6, 15; as normal, 130; ongoing cycle of, 63; passion followed with, 95–96; Personal Strategy Maps guided by, 124; potential with, 127; presence of mind element of, 16–17, 33–34; reminder exercise for, 128–29; resolution as element of, 18–21; Schultz taking steps of, 21; sports use of intuition and, 15, 40; stepping stones for, 101–2, 136–37, 138. See also epiphany; examples from history shallow creativity, 53–54 short-term actions, 100–101 Simon, Herbert, 3, 68 sixth sense. See intuition

smart phones, distraction and, 74–75, 129 smell, memory and, 2 sports: intuition and seventh sense used in, 15, 40; presence of mind and, 39–40 Starbucks, 8–10, 14–16, 18–20, 65 Stefani, Gwen, 56, 58 stepping stones, for seventh sense, 101–2, 136–37, 138 strategy: coup d’oeil and, 67–68; dictionary definitions and origins of, 66–67; expert intuition and, 68; Free Your Mind as, 91; new ideas for, 13; stress turned into, 79, 86. See also military strategy; personal strategy stress: mastering, 77; parts of, 76; strategy from, 79, 86. See also Free Your Mind; negative emotions Structured Content Management (SCM), 45–46 subgoals, 37–38 success, 28; bias and, 29–30; changing definition of, 105; Edison on, 126; Idea Networking for, 123; presence of mind to acknowledge, 41 Swan, Joseph, 113–14 Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman), 3 Tolstoy, Leo, 38, 62 Torrance, E. Paul, 54 Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain (Begley), 78

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Index

transitions, Personal Strategy Maps and, 103, 144 Treffinger, Donald, 54 triangulation, 26–27 Trotter, Lloyd, 70 unforeseen opportunity, from Idea Networking, 120–21, 139 Vohs, Kathleen, 52–54, 76 Wall Street Journal, 124–25 Wang, Shendi, 144–45, 146–47, 148 Weber, Elke, 47–48, 78–79 well-connected person: contacting, 118–19, 139–40;

flash of insight from, 118, 122; for Idea Networking, 118–20, 139; idea questions for, 119–20; network expansion through, 119, 140; selecting, 118, 139; thanking, 120 Western psychology, on negative emotions, 78 Whitman, Walt, 98, 135, 152 Wilson, Timothy, 75–76 withdrawing from world, 91–92 work: babies and changes with, 104–5, 106–7; Idea Networking leading to employment and, 120–21; personal strategy including, 5 Wozniak, Steve, 42 Wu, Katherine, 113

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