“When do you do your best thinking? Come on. I mean really put thought into an issue, problem, opportunity, strategy, product line, competitor that you or your business is facing?”
I like this question asked by Todd.
Everybody have their own answer to this question. The one I’ll present is the one I’m normally using. It’s a method that I tested and developed over time to cope with the way my mind work.
Okay, I face a problem, an issue, an opportunity, what do I do?
First, I learn about it. I try to understand it as well as I can with the resources I have. I try to learn the true nature of the thing. Without this knowledge, I couldn’t be able to do anything.
Sometimes, I’ll find the solution only by doing this. In this case, I’ll be really happy and will spend my saved time to drink to it. The problem is that resolving an issue only by doing this is rare.
If I don’t come up with a solution after hard work and explorations, I stop to think about it. I start to work on another non-related thing; I do something manual: doing sport, going outside, etc.
I have two goals by doing this.
The first one is to free my mind.
The second one is to stimulate it with new external stimulus. I do this in hope to create new connections in my brain; to see, unconsciously, the thing with another point of view.
If I’m lucky, within a day, a week or a month a hint will show up in my mind: a track to follow to resolve my given problem. My unconsciousness has then talked.
Its how I generally work: I feed my unconsciousness with the given problem then I let him think about it, waiting for a hint.
What I learned while developing this method? Patience and confidence. I needed to develop a confidence in my preliminary works and searching. I had to have the confidence that I done the good things to come up with a solution. Unfortunately, I didn’t find it but I knew I was on the good way. So I used my thinking method to try to come up with a solution. Then I needed to develop my patience to wait to see the results. Without any of these two things, the method would be useless.