By Douglas Kruger
DURING the holidays, my wife sent me a text message: “Henry Cavill is in the Island!”
By the way, what exactly is a “hall pass”?
She organised a posse and tried to corral the poor man. How apportionment of the prize might have played out, she never explained. But despite fanning out in a wide radius, wielding nets and cupcakes, Superman’s would-be abductors never did locate him, so he got away safely.
Personally, I didn’t get out much during the holidays. Not because of the weather, but because I had the best kind of problem. I had two books to work on and very tight deadlines for both, so I spent December holed up and typing furiously.
The first manuscript is a collection of “smart-cuts” from the world of behavioural economics. Penguin will publish it later this year, and I’ll share a good one with you on the far side of some shameless self-promotion.
The second is a thriller, which I am… uh… thrilled to tell you will be launching this year in the UK, published by Claret Press. I’ve given it the ominous title, House of the Judas Goat, and it features a child-smuggling syndicate posing behind the façade of a harmless student exchange programme.
Will the victims be able to escape the mansion on the hillside? And what if there’s a traitor among them? And will this launch me into the company of Peter James? Who knows?
Anyway, while scouring the world for behavioural smart-cuts, I found one that worked directly on my writing. It’s about problem-solving and how to get un-stuck. I thought I’d share it with you.
The theory goes that if you have a simple problem to solve, your best approach is just to buckle down and solve it. But if it’s a complex problem, you shouldn’t. Instead, you should daydream.
Why?
Because focused concentration recruits only a small portion of your brain. Daydreaming uses way, way more. Trouble is, it’s so counter-intuitive that we find it difficult to believe. It has about it the unattractive whiff of laziness. It becomes easier to accept once you understand a little about how the brain functions. I invite you to chase the fascinating history of this odd discovery through the pages of Elastic by Leonard Mlodinow.
The short version is that it took over a century for scientists themselves to believe it. For the longest time, it seemed obvious that active thinking represented the most brain activity. But we have measured and proved that it isn’t the case. Daydreaming recruits far greater total networks. This explains in mechanical terms what is meant by the phrase “thinking around a problem”.
Suffice to say, it works. For small-scale problem solving, buckle down and do it. But for large-scale problem-solving, do the more responsible thing. Daydream and thereby recruit more of your brain.
Here’s how to do it.
Lace up your boots. As you step out of the door, headed for St Ouen or one of the forest trails or even the gym treadmill, load your problem into the super-network of your brain. You do this using simple self-talk. No earphones, please. The point is not to concentrate on anything, and music takes up that mental real estate.
Then you wander, and you wonder.
Try a little self-talk, something like this:
“This project is a career-maker for me. I have to shoot the lights out. Trouble is, I have a limited budget. Also, Fred from accounts is sabotaging the whole thing. And nothing like this has ever been done before. It’s a new technology. How should I go about this? Okay, that’s the issue, brain. Have at it! Now, I’m going to switch off and enjoy this walk. Wow, what a pretty cloud. And look at that cute dog. You know what I like on toast? Marmalade. Nigella talks nice.”
And, go.
You can also use a variation on this technique to solve writer’s block. Or any creative procrastination.
Firstly, do not label it “writer’s block”, which cues your mind to perceive stalling as a process of shutting down. Instead, reframe your hesitation as “creative planning”. You are “circling the work”. This cues the mind to think of hesitation as an initiation process, a way of getting started.
Tell yourself you will begin producing in half an hour. For now, you will just sit and dream. Sit at your computer, your easel, your musical instrument. Don’t focus on work, just tinker. Sharpen a pencil. Click on a file. Read what you wrote yesterday, then sit back and muse about it.
Take as much time as you need.
Importantly, do not follow other paths, like clicking on news or social-media sites. Keep the work in front of you and daydream around that in particular. Let your mind wander in its presence.
Smart phones kill this approach. The associative processes of elastic thinking do not thrive when the conscious mind is in a focused state. A relaxed mind explores novel ideas. An occupied mind searches for the most familiar ideas, which are usually the least interesting, creative or far-reaching. Our tech is battering the boredom we need. We require “unfocused drift”.
Your subconscious, whether you know it or not, is exploring the problem. This is not an indulgence, it is a necessity. You will probably not even notice the moment that it switches from creative circling to focused production.
It’s simple but powerful. Why not try it this week? And don’t be surprised if the nature of your output becomes significantly more creative than usual, recruiting unusual solutions. That’s the power of invoking much more of your incredible brain.
You can even apply it to solving life’s most confounding riddles: How does one pin down the Man of Steel?
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Douglas Kruger lives in St Helier. An award-winning speaker, he writes both fiction and non-fiction, available at Amazon.
