I’ve been getting a fair number of private emails from my last post on solving the housing crisis. Many of them are asking how I came up with the idea. One person even commented on the blog saying that I must have worked my brain to exhaustion on the idea. And yet, I didn’t really. I just posed the question to my conscious and subconscious mind and let it sit and simmer for a bit. And (and here’s the important part), I assumed there was an answer. I did this because I know that:
- I can focus on the goal, or I can focus on the obstacle, but I can’t focus on both at the same time.
- My subconscious mind often knows things that my conscious mind doesn’t.
Goals and Obstacles
If you know where you’re going, then you will always know how to get there. There will always be obstacles in the path, but they aren’t a problem until you change your focus from the goal to the obstacle. I try to tell people to look at the obstacle through their peripheral vision. See if just enough to see what’s in the way and find your way around it. But never take your eye off the goal – not for one instant. Because the moment you do, you run the risk of losing track of the goal and getting invested in the obstacle.
Pessimism and the Economy
The challenge is that most people talking about the economy today are focusing on the obstacle of foreclosures, lack of credit and job loss. They are looking for things to complain about and things to be afraid of. When this is your goal, you’ll find it. But when you know with all your heart that there is a solution, you’ll find it because you’re programming your subconscious mind to find it.
Unshackling Your Subconscious
Did you ever notice that you can think about something really hard for a long time and not come up with a solution? You try and try and eventually you just throw your hands up in the air and walk away. And then, sometime down the road, when you’re in the shower or driving to a social engagement, or you wake up in the middle of the night, the answer is just there in front of you – simple, elegant and complete. While your conscious mind had let go of it, your subconscious mind was working hard in the background.
Finding The Balance
What most people don’t realize is that your conscious mind and your subconscious mind can’t work at the same time. To optimize the process, you need to hold a problem lightly in your mind. Think on it a little, let go of it a lot and be patient about finding the solution. Carol Johnson posed the question over a month before I posted my solution. I started by defining the problem in my conscious mind, then I let it go into my subconscious. I had the inkling of the idea within a week. I sat with it for another week to decide whether it was a good idea. Then I put my conscious mind to work on the details. And then I slept on it for a few days. I spent the most time writing up the example. And during the writing of it, I came up with the affordable housing angle as I wondered what would happen if someone still foreclosed and how to make lemonade out of that lemon.
Ask Good Questions
I have often told people that the quality of the answers you get is directly related to the quality of the questions you ask. If you ask bad questions, or worse, if you don’t ask questions at all, then you don’t get answers. Why didn’t I come up with my solution to the housing crisis before? No one asked me. I hadn’t considered the question. I got no answer because I didn’t ask the question. When you get stuck and your self conscious mind offers no solution, ask yourself some new questions.
Let Go of Your Assumptions
The other way people get stuck is to cling to their assumptions. How did I come up with the housing solution? I didn’t assume that the house and the land had to be kept together. Now this is probably the hardest piece of the puzzle to learn. The problem is that we don’t often know what our assumptions are. They are so ingrained in our thinking that we don’t even recognize that we are making them. So I encourage you to question everything about the scenario. For example, I am currently looking at how to re-design business to support a happier life for people at large and I am questioning my assumptions so much so that I am even questioning whether we should be operating in a money-based economy. The school is still out on that, but that’s not the point. The point here is that I am questioning a basic assumption within our culture at large. If you go to that extent when you are looking at a problem, you are guaranteed to find a unique and valuable solution.
