While searching for a particular book in my office, I stumbled across Daniel Pink’s book, “A Whole New Mind”. I had loved the book and also had enjoyed listening to Daniel give the keynote address at one of our annual AMI/USA Refresher Courses. As I flipped through pages, I realized THIS was where I had gotten the inspiration to read “Chickens”!
The gist of “A Whole New Mind” is that, in order to survive well in the future, we need to develop additional – specifically, right brain – abilities. He lists these abilities as Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, and Play. These are not meant to replace the familiar Left Brain functions, but to work in tandem with them.
Pink defines Symphony as the ability to “put the pieces together”; the opposite of “analysing”. I was using Symphony when I bought the magazine “Chickens” without fully utilizing this ability. As I wrote in my previous post, I learned a lot from the magazine – but I missed something important! Pink suggests using Symphony as a way to problem-solve and gain new insights. He gave the example of how reading the magazine “Cake Decorating” gave him a better way to design his business cards. Go figure!
So I’m now ready to head back to Barnes & Noble – with a “problem” in mind – to see what sort of insights I can gain from reading another magazine that I’ve never noticed before.
Daniel Pink calls it “freshening your thinking”. What a great example to set for your children.
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