Jack Lalanne surprises again: The power of lateral thinking

Image: Weight Lift­ing by mjzitek

Impos­si­ble dreams

Do you think a pro­fes­sional weight lifter could lift 1,000 pounds? What about you? Do you tink you can lift 1,000 pounds? If you think the answer is no, think again.

Still think you can’t? Take a look at this video from one of my favourite char­ac­ters, Jack Lalane, and you will find just how easy it would be for you to do it (link). Sure, you may say that doing it that way is cheat­ing (haven’t seen the video yet? You really ought to see it! Go and take a look — we will wait for you), but what jack does has noth­ing to do with cheating..

The power of Lat­eral Thinking

No, what Jack was talk­ing about has every­thing to do with cre­ative think­ing. Not like those “cre­ative account­ing” tricks in the arse­nal of rogue advi­sors that cor­rupt senior exec­u­tives at banks & multi­na­tion­als; rather, the kind of cre­ative think­ing that Edward de Bono encour­ages in his books (link) . Lat­eral think­ing, cre­ative problem-solving, and intu­itive rea­son are some of the names given to the thought process that abol­ishes bound­aries for a few min­utes as a mech­a­nism to find unusual ways to solve prob­lems. Every time we read, hear, or think about a prob­lem, our mind imme­di­ately makes assump­tions and places con­straints on the way to approach the problem.

Think about it; with­out these pre-defined fil­ters, the num­ber of ridicu­lous pos­si­bil­i­ties we would enter­tain would quickly lead to analysis-by-paralysis. Yet this use­ful char­ac­ter­is­tic of our mind is our own enemy when it comes to increas­ing our problem-solving reper­toire. Devel­op­ing the abil­ity to look at our own real­ity from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on a reg­u­lar basis becomes a crit­i­cal tool in our per­sonal devel­op­ment arse­nal. With­out it,we become slaves to our own rou­tines and frames-of-mind. We become uncon­sciously incom­pe­tent on cre­ative problem-solving.

Diver­sity of per­spec­tives: the path to creativity

In a way, that is why many mod­ern cor­po­ra­tions have espoused diver­sity as a desired trait of their work­force. Some may think it only has to do with legal require­ments to prove that they do not dis­crim­i­nate on the basis of sex, colour, race, or reli­gion. But for smart com­pa­nies it is the type of acknowl­edge­ment prov­ing that a diverse work-force with a vari­ety of life– and world-views will be more likely to look at busi­ness prob­lems from dif­fer­ent and some­times unusual angles; and in doing so, pro­vide those in man­age­ment & lead­er­ship with great insights into new opportunities.

So do your­self a favour, and develop your cre­ative think­ing mus­cles; exer­cise insan­ity for short peri­ods of time, and see the type of aston­ish­ing solu­tions your brain can come up with. I promise you will at the very least enjoy the process, and at best will find great and effort­less ways to solve your cur­rent problems.

Tagged as: Creativity, Diversity, Jack Lalanne, Lateral Thinking, Thinking outside the box