Posts filed under ‘Create Distance’
‘LIFECYCLE: 365 days in the life of a bike in NYC’
“Get a bike. Lock it to a post. Take a pic every day for a year.
Last year, Red Peak Branding conducted a unique urban experiment for Hudson Urban Bicycles. On January 1, 2011 we chained a fully loaded bike – bells, basket, lights and more – to a post along a busy Soho street. We took a picture of the bike everyday for 365 days, watching it slowly vanish before our eyes.”
This experiment gives you an opportunity to exercise the Fresh Ideas strategy ‘Create Distance’ – even if only as a mental exercise.
How?
Creativity thrives on diversity – of experiences, vantage points, mind sets, habits…. If someone took a picture of you every day for 365 days, what would it tell you about the amount of diversity incorporated into your lifestyle?
Wandering Minds at Work
Thanks to Dave VanBrunt for this week’s post – he forwarded an interesting article with research findings that highlight the importance of off-task time. Here’s an excerpt:
“Why do our minds wander? Brain-scanning technology has uncovered some clues. It turns out that when your mind drifts, your temporal lobes — which are associated with processing long-term memories — become busier. So when you float off into a reverie, you’re actually doing important data-storage work.
Daydreaming isn’t just the mind’s way of processing information, though. Other scans have found that the wandering mind also utilizes the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that’s involved in problem-solving. The upshot, says Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara who is studying this area, is that your idling mind is likely doing deeply creative work, tackling your hairiest long-term tasks — projects you’ve been trying to address for months, the arc of your career, the state of your marriage. “Mind-wandering is actually a very involved task,” Schooler says. ‘You leave the here and now and focus on more remote concerns that nevertheless might be more important. We’ve been focusing on the downside of this, but we need to think about the upside.’”
On-task subscribers to Fresh Ideas will recognize links to the ‘Create Distance‘ strategy.
