Tonight we began the journey…
A journey of exploration of learning, creativity, communication, and who knows what else we’ll bump into along the way. It’s amazing how fast time goes by… At 8:15 I looked down at the clock and couldn’t believe it… It felt like we had only be going twenty minutes, not an hour… Moreover, I felt like we could’ve taken another hour or so and just continued to converse on some of the components we touched on. Here’s a couple of the topics we dialogued about… Feel free to throw some “juice” on the one’s that seemed to resonate with you the most. And perhaps, we can continue the conversation until next time…
· None of us know how to peel a banana… (We’ll except Abby)
And all of us have been “peeling’em” since we were kids.
Not once, have did we question if there was an easier way, a better way, a more efficient way, a more God designed way… (We’ll now we all know and our lives will never be the same J) But, more than being enlightened banana peelers, we must ask ourselves, are there more “bananas” around us… in our homes, how we parent, how we communicate, how we teach, everything… What have we learned from our experience with the banana?
· Most of us have been well trained to find “the answer."
The “right answer” and for most of us there was only one. We looked for “the one,” filled in the blank, and moved on to the next question. That works well for breezing through a biology class, where most of us didn’t want to be there in the first place. I used to love those “easy” teachers that handed us the fill-in-the-blank worksheets… each question encoded with the exact phrase of the book… The challenge is… Life doesn’t always adhere to a fill-in-the-blank methodology. In fact, it rarely does. As a result, many of us still stop at the first answer – our thinking capacities have been limited and our creativity and imagination rendered handicap.
"Nothing is more dangerous than an idea
when it is the only one we have."
(Emile Chartier)
· We need to develop the ability to look for the “Second Right Answer.”
There are many things in which there are many “right answers” and to simply stop at the “first one” could serve to be more detrimental than we would like to admit.
"Discovery
consists of looking
at the same thing
as everyone else and
thinking something
different."
(Albert
Szent-Gyorgyi)
· "One technique for finding the second right answer is to change the questions you use to probe a problem. For example, how many times have you heard someone say, 'What is the answer?' or 'What is the meaning of this?' or 'What is the result?' These people are looking for the answer, and the meaning, and the result. And that's all they'll find - just one. If you train yourself to ask questions that solicit plural answers like 'What are the answers?' or 'What are the meanings?' or 'What are the results?' you will find that people will think a little more deeply and offer more than one idea.”
As the Nobel Prize winning chemist Linus Pauling put it:
· The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.
· What
about the Photographer, who takes hundreds of pictures. She knows that the more
she takes - the chances are greater of taking a “good” one. This correlates to ideas
and creativity. What areas of your life can you implement this?