Sloan Creative

Thinking more, thinking better

I came across John Medina’s Brain Rules the other day on the radio… his enthusiasm and clarity were quite engaging. I jotted down the title for my next book shopping adventure and filed his name away in my mind under, “Interesting.”

Applied to child development

Separately this week, I learned of the Talaris Institute and their work to “provide research-based products and services that enhance parent effectiveness in the first six years of life.” Putting the latest findings in brain research into the hands of those who can really make a difference with it.

Later, I put the two together and realized that John Medina was the founder of Talaris.  Fun!

Learning to learn better

Of course, this is all interesting to me, with three children, 6 weeks to 6 years old, and a never-ending study habit.

I was happy to notice that the first rule is exercise, because it has some interesting resonance for me:

• Our children’s school has the children out on a long walk every day of the year, snow or shine and teaches math by movement games, using the children’s entire bodies to soak up the relationships between numbers.
• Thomas Jefferson, in his letter to Peter Carr, August 19, 1785, suggests that he devote 2 hours daily to walking, as an integral part of his studies.
• I usually get my best ideas walking in the woods near our house. Luckily, technology makes it easy to capture them, using a digital voice recorder and dictation software means that, now, you can write anywhere and have it end up on-line quickly.

Another interesting rule is #6: Long Term Memory- remember to repeat which, combined with rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses, reminds me of the Method of Loci as described in The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, the story of a Jesuit who traveled to China and taught the technique there.  I don’t imagine that it would matter if the vision was through our physical or mind’s eye.

So, these brain rules are great for giving kids solid foundations and keeping the elderly functioning, but what about those of us in the middle of our lives?

Life long learning

Can we still develop our minds, or did all that stop when we traded our dorm rooms for cubicles?

I stumbled upon the fact that the average college student in this country spends only 3.1 hours per day on “educational activities.” What? Even working full time, I could slip that in between the kid’s and my own bedtimes. You mean I could keep study as much as I did in college my entire working life?

Recently, I read an inspiring book by A. G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life in which he states that one can do a large amount of deeply intellectual work in just 2 hours per day. If you could be a contributing intellectual in addition to your current work, would you?

So much of how I think today I have learned post college, it saddens me to read that most Americans either don’t read or haven’t practiced enough to read proficiently.

Use it or lose it

What can we do to start using our brains more and more effectively? If we fail to use and develop our own minds, we may just lose the right to do so… as those who do think start doing more and more of our thinking for us. See Giambattista Vico’s New Science for a fascinating look at how this might play out in our society, as it did for the Romans.

My new mental jungle gym is the Great Books of the Western World. Amazingly fun. The Syntopicon alone is worth the price of admission. Much more on this later.

That’s all for now.

Feel free to return to the book you were reading before you landed here.

Sometimes a decision is we don’t often think about are the ones that affect our lives the most.

Many years ago, a friend of mine asked me, “How can you go to Europe from month every year?”

He’d begun to notice my pattern of quietly leaving for Europe in the first days of February for the past several years. He was successful, a young attorney, with a nice house in a cool neighborhood near the beach and a hip car. I had a business, a house, and her car too, but…

The difference was, that I had realized several years earlier that if I could keep my ego out of two decisions I could maintain a fair amount of freedom in my life. The key decisions were:

House and car

If I could keep my ego out of those decisions and do only what was practical, I would have the financial freedom to do many other things. So, rather than live in Laguna Beach like most of my friends, I lived in a tiny, bland house in a less expensive area about a 20 minute ride in my used, generic car.

So, as a small business owner what are your key decisions?

Of course, the house and the car still matter. But what small business related decisions affect your experience of freedom? So many times I’ve noticed small business people who experience, behind the pride of business ownership, the horror of feeling owned by their business. Their business sets their schedule, or controls where they live, and interrupts their peaceful enjoyment of life both day and night.

The key decisions for most small businesses seem to be:

Wages paid to staff

• Well-managed staff can free owners from most time and space constraining business demands.
• Poorly-managed staff can be the heaviest anchor an owner experiences. Sometimes the best management means letting them seek employment elsewhere.

Growth curve

• Growth requires investment in product development, sales, marketing, improve operational systems, additional staff, and receivables financing.
• Our current business culture glorifies growth as our popular culture glorifies painfully thin youth
• The right size and growth rate for your business depends upon many factors. Ignoring or sublimating any can lead to uncomfortable or even disastrous results.

Have you been is conscious of the decisions that you’ve made in these areas as you would like to be? Have your prior decisions lead you to some place uncomfortable or even potentially disastrous?

If this resonates with you or someone you know please let me know. I’d be happy to chat.

Stephen Sloan offers small business consulting from Bainbridge Island, Washington, 98110 (near Seattle, on the Kitsap Peninsula) to small business owners all over the world.

You’ve probably at least heard of Napoleon Hill’s classic, Think and Grow Rich. The basic idea is that by putting real focus into thinking your path to riches can be made shorter and smoother.

But, what if your path to riches has resulted in you feeling that your business owns you more often than you own it.

Have you gained a good income but given up your spatial and temporal freedom? Can you do what you want when and where you want to do it? Can you easily take this afternoon off to enjoy the sun? Can you spend three weeks bicycling on Bali if you choose?

Are you sacrificing:

• Time with your children
• Time with your spouse
• Time with your passions
• Your health
• Your ability to explore the world

For the sake of your business?

The thinking that got you into this situation will not be the thinking that gets you moving into freer more authentic territory.

But how to think differently? How to think better?

Thinking is usually based on:

Information

• Good, solid data clearly analyzed in the spreadsheet
• What assumptions are you building upon? Are they rock or sand?
• What about what your body is telling you?
• What fresh perspective might literature or art provide?

Processes

• Consciously perform deductive and inductive reasoning
• Clear analysis to avoid common logical fallacies
• Using thinking visualization tools to identify areas requiring more clarity

Both information and process can be refined and improved with only a small investment of time. Of course, you can do it yourself. If you’d like a friendly companion along the way to help speed the process and make it more fun, I’d be happy to help.

Call me for a free consultation. (206) 793-4020

Stephen Sloan offers small business consulting from Bainbridge Island, Washington, 98110 (near Seattle, on the Kitsap Peninsula) to small business owners all over the world.

Running a business is fascinating. Running a business is also often difficult, usually more emotionally challenging than taxing to mind and body.

It has always been so…

The fascination of what’s difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

W. B. Yeats September 1909- working as the director-manager of the Abbey theatre

I used to love the Zen koan,

It is not the way that is difficult,

but the difficult that is the way.

And the great American Horatio Alger questions:

• If not me, who?

• If not now, when?

I consciously pursued what was difficult.

• I thought I read too slowly coming out of high school, so I choose a reading intensive major, History

• I felt shy, so I became a Realtor and forced myself to cold call and hold open houses

• I feared poverty, so I stepped up to managing a business with 35 employees, most older than I, when I was 24

• I feared irrelevance, so I took on the chairmanship of our industry’s leading coop.

• I saw a real need and opportunity, so I left that business to create software to help the entire industry

I burned myself out.

Now, 5 years later, I finally threw the bolt! I signed my last payroll check in December 2006, after 16 years of having employees.

I am free to choose new difficulties that fascinate me.

I’ve found that I still must pursue what’s difficult. I haven’t figured out if it’s just in my nature or in human nature.

I think everyone finds it a bit more natural to walk uphill rather than down. This is especially true with climbing. But, so many folks, in our leisure-based culture, seem to spend most of their time avoiding what is difficult - distracting themselves with work, activities, entertainment and consumption.

Now, as I choose new difficulties, I am more respectful of that koan. I try to choose my difficulties more carefully:

Why am I choosing this?

• Reasons that should prompt a pause and reflection

  • Feeling inadequate

  • Feeling bored

• Reasons that indicate the difficulty might lead someplace interesting

  • It takes me towards a more conscious, integrated life

  • It takes me towards more fully expressing what is uniquely me

  • It serves some higher calling you see working near you

Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
Henry Kissinger

My current projects include:

• Leadership support for small business owners- like coaching, except that I actually do stuff!
• Researching and writing on my family history, the tip of the iceberg here

Enjoy the ride, getting off makes a real mess.