Super Brain Power: 6 Keys To Unlocking Your Hidden Genius – Jean Marie Stine
Most people struggle through life because they either do not know how powerful their brains are, or try to improve on accessing the power. They therefore cannot tap into the enormous wealth of intelligence and creativity available to them by the power of their brains, which is there to enable them provide effective solutions to whatever challenges they might face in life.
There is proven evidence from researchers that most people use only about ten percent of the capacity of their brains, which explains why most people the world over are not so successful in their businesses, relationships, finances, and careers. The more access you have to the power of your brain, the more intelligence that will be available to you to overcome any challenge confronting you.
Here, I share with you an excerpt of the book, Super Brain Power: 6 Keys To Unlocking Your Hidden Genius written by Jean Marie Stine, the popular national workshop leader who has helped thousands of people across the country access their hidden brain power to achieve tremendous success.
This book will enable you to reach deep into your brain’s six distinct forms of intelligence: Visual, Verbal, Logical, Creative, Physical, and Emotional, and achieve success in every area of your life – this might just be the best brain improvement book you have ever read.
Excerpt:
Reversal
Originality is the essential difference between those who go all the way to the top and the rest of us. While others flail away blindly with their heads against a wall with the same failed approaches, there are no limits for someone who can find an original way, under, around, through, or over.
Whatever you are working with the public, managing a department, shepherding your company through the rocky waters of today’s business climate, hoping to be the next bestselling hip-hop group, or aiming for early retirement, originality is the grease that makes the going easy.
You can use today’s technique to tap your creative genius any time you are in urgent need of a fresh idea, or when you’re simply drawing a blank over a long-standing problem. It’s also an ideal method of jump-starting your creative juices when they aren’t flowing as well as you like, or when they are stubbornly refusing to flow at all.
You Have It – And It’s Worth One Million Dollars
It’s not unusual to get stuck for ideas. It kind of goes with the territory of being human. You might consider this tendency the downside of being able to learn. Here’s how we become blocked in our efforts to create fresh, original notions.
During childhood, when our minds are learning for the first time about the world around us, each day is a constant succession of new and unfamiliar situations, discoveries, reactions, and assumptions.
By our twenties, however, most of the basic situations in life have become all too familiar – angry bosses, being short of cash, rejection in love, someone swerving into our lane on the freeway – and we have developed an established set of responses to them.
Familiar responses are terrific for dealing with familiar situations, most of the time, allowing us to respond quickly, without wasting time and energy reasoning out how we should react.
But they have disadvantages, too. For instance, we can come to rely on familiar responses and assumptions to carry us through situations, and we have a hard time deciding how to respond to something that’s without precedent in our lives. Worse, we tend to become blind to any outcome that does not fit in with our normal perceptions and assumptions.
The age of computers is just as guilty of this kind of blind, unthinking response in the face of change. The first computers in the early fifties were operated by typing in long sequences of command numbers and letters, and computer experts and designers got used to its being that way.
So when it came time to design the home PC, they fell back on the familiar way of operating it – typing in long commands. The result was the near failure of the home PC. It was only when Steve Jobs broke away from the familiar responses and assumptions that he realized the PC could be made to type its own commands; all the user should have to do is click a cute little icon to initiate the process.
As you can see, original ideas are so fundamental to success you can’t afford the lack of them to stand in your way for very long. Luckily, there’s a blindingly simple process for overcoming the limiting, but familiar assumptions that prevent you from scheming up fresh, original notions. I call this technique “reversal,†and it draws on a mental skill you use every day.
“Reversal†gives you the same ability that has enabled tens of thousands of people to become millionaires. (This is another of those claims I know you will find difficult to believe. But suspend your disbelief until the end of the chapter, and you will discover every word is true.)
How You Can Strike Creative Paydirt With Reversal – Every Time
The goal of today’s exercise is to free you from the limitations of familiar assumptions so your creative intelligence can come into play. A great way to do this when you are at a loss for a new idea or solution is simply to take one’s bedrock assumptions and reverse them.
As with other super brain power techniques, this may sound simple in principle, but don’t be fooled, the results will seem to be far out of proportion to the effort.
In fact, fortunes in professions far outside the arts or sciences – in construction, real estate, pharmaceuticals, computers, the food-service industry, and a thousand other businesses – have been founded on ideas that consisted of nothing more than a normal, everyday assumption someone turned upside-down and backward.
A retired southerner named Harlan Sanders took the idea that restaurants should offer a varied fare so as to have something for everyone and reversed it. The result: Col. Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken, a restaurant that served only a single entrée.
Everybody goes to bookstores for books. Amazon.com reversed that assumption. The result: People began shopping virtual bookstores, their purchases delivered by mail. Retail industry wisdom was that to make a profit with a chain store, it must be located in an urban or suburban area with a dense population near a major traffic artery.
Sam Walton stood that assumption on its crown, and Wal-Mart, the result, was the world’s most profitable discount chain, with operations thriving in smaller communities starved for low-cost shopping.
Creative Intelligence Builder: Reversal
The reversal exercise is remarkably simple. It takes only a couple of minutes of thought, and it will kick-start your creative IQ.
You will need a pen and a sheet of paper at first. But once you have learned the technique, you will be able to do it easily in your head.
1. List your basic assumptions about your problem, or whatever you need a creative nudge with, as a series of “is†statements that describe how something “is†or how it “is†related to something else.
This will help you focus your assumptions by putting them into clear, declarative statements. (If you were an entrepreneur with a yen to be a restaurateur and you were looking for an original concept that would stand out from the competition, you might write your assumptions as: “A restaurant is an establishment where people come to eat food.â€
“A restaurant is an establishment where people pay for the food they eat.†“A restaurant is an establishment where people can find varied fare to please any palate.â€)
2. Beginning with what you consider your most important assumption, write a sentence reversing each assumption to create its opposite. This is another reason for using “is†sentences.
It makes turning them back on themselves easier. (Take our first restaurant assumption; Thomas Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza, might have reversed that by writing, “A restaurant is an establishment that sends food out to people.â€
Or take the second assumption: Earl Clifton, founder of Los Angeles’s legendary Clifton’s Cafeterias chain, might have reversed it by writing, “A restaurant is an establishment that gives food away.â€
That’s what he did in the 1930s, serving millions of bowls of a free, if slightly flavorless soup stock fortified with every essential vitamin, protein, and mineral. Defying the odds, the act brought him appreciative paying patrons, Clifton prospered where many failed, and the chain lased well into the 1970s.
As for the third assumption, Col. Sanders might have reversed it by writing, “A restaurant is an establishment that has a limited menu, focused on a single entrée.â€)
3. Review each of your reversed assumptions. Ask yourself, is there evidence that supports or contradicts it?(Thomas Monaghan might have noted that people were often willing to drive several miles for take-out Chinese food and pizza on Friday and Saturday nights; that might support the notion of a restaurant that delivers its food to the customers.
Earl Clifton might have said that goodwill and word of mouth are the two main ways restaurants build their customer base, and giving the poor thousands of bowls of nutritious soup that costs me only pennies could be the ideal way to generate both. Col.
Sanders might have observed that pizza and barbecue restaurants were becoming very popular in the post-World War II era and that an establishment specializing in the kind of old-fashioned, finger-licking fried chicken grandmother used to make just might attract a clientele, too.)
4. Try out any of your reversed assumptions that seem as if they might have validity.
This is a great book by all standard, and I very much gladly recommend it to you if you desire to harness the full power of your brain and create a world of all round success for yourself.