Reading an amazing book by Edward de Bono called Lateral Thinking.
It was published in 1973. You have GOT TO read it!
“The most effective way of changing ideas is not from outside by conflict but from within by the insight rearrangement of available information.”
YES!!!
“You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper.”
YES!!!
The disadvantage of how our minds work is that, “there is a marked tendency to ‘polarize’. This means moving to either extreme instead of maintaining some balanced point between them.”
This is why being deliberate about your vantage point is so critical. You must anchor in the polarization of GRATITUDE, and then push into the balance of gratitude and who you want to be.
“Vertical thinking is selective and lateral thinking is generative.
Vertical thinking moves only if there is a direction to move, lateral thinking moves in order to generate a direction.
Vertical thinking is analytical, lateral thinking is provocative.
Vertical thinking is sequential, lateral thinking can make jumps.
With vertical thinking one has to be correct at every step, with lateral thinking one does not have to be.
With vertical thinking one uses the negative in order to block off certain pathways. With lateral thinking there is no negative.
With vertical thinking one concentrates and excludes what is irrelevant, with laterl thinking one welcomes chance intrusions.
Vertical thinking is a finite process, lateral thinking is a probabilistic one.
With lateral thinking one uses information not for its own sake but provocatively in order to bring about repatterning.”
This is POWERFUL stuff. You probably already do it on some level. But, you can do it deliberately and consistently.
This is what we all need in life and in business. This is what harmony is so very much about.
REPATTERNING our brains and our behaviors to take ourselves from who we are into who we have always wanted to be.
Outside our circle… when we “wish we were different or our companies where different” we are looking for rights and wrongs. We are excluding options and looking only for right answers, but selectively reducing their probability and any chance at brainstorming.
Lateral thinking and harmony is how Yellow Tail wines becomes the largest selling wine in the WORLD only years after its introduced, because it focuses on selling wine to beer drinkers not wine drinkers. Go where the market is NOT!
Lateral thinking is how that water fountain company reinvents itself by providing a way to fill your bottle and save the earth, and now takes a product that was completely commoditized and cant make enough of them (they are virtually in every college and airport in the United States and growing like crazy).
Lateral thinking is how Andre Rieu a classical violinist becomes one of the top selling artists in the WORLD, in the sphere of Justin Bieber and Beyonce, by delivering classical music in an engaging, colorful and provocative way.
We dream of the possibilities… but then we anchor ourselves in the vantage point of wishing and looking at our deficiencies. We dream of the possibilities and anchor ourselves with vertical thinking instead of lateral thinking.
Live and work PROVOCATIVELY…
Start with gratitude and then allow yourself to think freely...
AND LATERALLY!
Achieve lateral HARMONY… Allow yourself to dream… and DO IT!
Let’s change the world…
Read this book!!!
Yours in the pursuit of HARMONY!
Nestor Benavides