We have a whole industry of knowledge workers. But most businesses are not producing ‘products’ in the manner of a Henry Ford assembly line.
Many organisations have a pressure-cooker culture, aimed to maximise the outputs of workers for every hour they are in the office. How can businesses encourage more aha moments? Looking over your key challenge or area of interest prior to sleep or a nap may well offer up the insight for which you’re searching. There are countless tales of visions and deeper understanding attained through sleep, for example, this fascinating story on how the periodic table eventually became the shape we know it today, as told by the late Oliver Sacks. There’s also some evidence that a short midday nap can improve alertness, and has positive effects upon the maintenance of daytime vigilance level. This matter is cleaned up through normal, natural sleep cycles. After the haze of a day’s decisions, waste matter builds up in the brain which affects cognitive processes. There’s solid reasoning in why we recommend people ‘sleep on it’. It might not be such a good idea to double dose espresso and burn the midnight oil trying to solve a problem. “A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.” swear by morning pages as a powerful exercise in cleansing the clutter of the mind. Keep writing, even if you can only think of: “I have nothing to write.” As a regular habit each morning, many famous creatives, filmmakers etc. The rules: you can write whatever you like – throw in a drawing, whatever – as you’ll never show these pages to anyone. Morning pages can be a powerful way to empty your buzzing subconscious onto the page to make room for clear thinking and inspiration. Somewhere between automatic writing and journaling, the concept of morning pages was brought to popularity through Julia Cameron’s bestselling book The Artist’s Way.
#Lifes aha moments full#
If you’re not familiar, that’s handwriting three full pages each morning, before the distractions of the day begin. Too much internal chatter to hear yourself think? Try morning pages. But I am sure that it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.” “Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps subconsciousness–I wouldn’t know. You can’t make good decisions if you’re stressed, so why would you come up with good ideas in that state? We also need to quiet any guilt and worry about how we’ll solve the problem these thoughts only cloud our judgement. Take your shoes off at the local park, stake out some thinking time in a conference room. In the study, they directed participants to meditate (highly recommended), although a quiet, minimally stimulating place may be just as beneficial. If you need a break, make it a silent one.įindings published in Psychological Science showed that people made smarter decisions after just 15 minutes of undisturbed time because it made them more resistant to their own biases. It’s been proven time and again that no one can focus intently on more than one thing at a time. If one of those tasks requires deep thinking, it’s horribly inefficient. Much as we all like to think we’re fantastic at multitasking, in reality, we’re switching between tasks. But why, and how can organisations utilise this? Powerful ideas often come to us when we’ve moved away from directly tackling a challenge, such as in the shower… or bath. Actively focusing on working through a process (digesting, chunking, action) will usually limit the possibility of aha-innovation. Taking a break from the puzzle to take a bath, the story goes that he observed the displacement of the water and lept out into the city streets completely naked, yelling ‘Eureka!’ (Latin for, I found it!).Īn issue with inspiration is that it can rarely be coerced. Under a different name, the idea dates even further back to the anecdote about Archimedes trying to find a method for determining the volume of an irregular object. Naïvely, the “Aha! moment” was attributed by one author to Oprah Winfrey in fact, it goes back to at least 1931. Some may put it down to divine inspiration, but we know there are many ways that individuals and businesses create more of these moments.
Best described as ‘a moment of sudden insight or discovery’, aha! moments can change the course of careers and companies.
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