We worry about a lot of stuff. Money, family, jobs, school, university … whatever. Since we do it such a lot, it must be really helpful, right? Let’s take a look.

(Take a while to go through these questions, actually. It’s not just a gimmick I came up with.)

• Does worry help you sleep?
• Does worry help you solve problems?
• Does worry make you feel better about difficult situations?
• Does worry promote well-being in any important area of your life (relationships, finance, job)?
• Does worry help solve problems that you can’t really solve anyway (e.g. the recession)?

So does worrying have any kind of positive impact whatsoever in your life? No it does not! So why on earth do we do it so much? Genuine question! What’s the point?! Worry does nothing. You are not being irresponsible by refusing to worry about something. Worrying about a problem isn’t the same as trying to solve it, so it’s at best useless, and at worst, harmful.

I realised this one night when I was in bed. As ever, my brain sprung into action, winding itself tighter and tighter around a problem area in my life at the moment.

I suddenly realised that now was not the time and place to be trying to come up with solutions, much less make them larger in my head. It was the time for restful sleep! Since my brain was being naughty, I told it off.

Seriously, I literally told my brain off. “Listen up, brain, now is not the time for such rubbish!” And such like. Sometimes you literally have to prise thoughts away from your own mind, like getting a stick from a dog. It’s a sheer act of will.

Practical steps

When you take something away from a baby (scissors, screwdrivers, the cat’s tail) you need to make sure you give it something else or it will miss the thing it was holding before. Your brain is just like that. Stop the worrying with willpower, and then force yourself to think about something else. If you’re trying to sleep, think about the sea, or a summer’s day or whatever New Age-y imagery you want to use to help you sleep. For me, it has to be a pleasant day dream that develops naturally without much effort.

Writing down concerns is also helpful. It lets your worry-brain know that you’re taking its concerns seriously. Listening can be a really powerful tool.

If you’re worried about a job or some problem, I find a physical aid like a brainstorm is really helpful. It gives me something concrete to focus on instead of the formless crap inside my head.

Also, the more good stuff inside your brain, the more likely it is to come out. So fill your head with helpful books, films, TV, conversations, music. Then you’re more likely to produce positive stuff!

Read more

• Anxiety Culture
• How to stop worrying
• How to stop worrying and why

I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad * by Robert Kiyosaki. Robert is a very successful entrepreneur, and this book is about his journey. It’s great for “thinkers” because it show you how to use your mind to make money. As a thinker rather than a doer, I found it really encouraging and liberating to learn that I can be successful too. If you’re a follower of this blog, you’ll know that I’m prone to exaggeration, but for once I can say that with all sobriety that this book has changed my life. (I’m not rich — not yet — but it’s dramatically impacted the way I think).

One of the principles he talks about is the need to acquire assets in order to make money. Assets are anything that make you money rather than lose it. So, for example, if you own a house and rent it out, you make money from it (people pay you to live there). On the other hand a car, traditionally seen as an asset, in fact loses you money because it goes down in value and you spend money on it (fuel, repairs, tax, etc).

I think the same principle can be applied to confidence. Spend your time getting things that add to your confidence. Just like if you buy some houses to rent out, you’re acquiring money-making assets, you can “buy” things in your life that will give you a return on your investment in terms of confidence (and a whole host of other things, such as optimism, experience, wisdom, growth).

If you have an unhealthy habit, say smoking, quit it! Don’t see this as getting rid of something bad, see it as acquiring something good. Quitting it will give you a sense of accomplishment. You can then reinvest this accomplishment into new projects. Your thinking will be, “I quit smoking, I could … ” (you get to choose what you do next).

A great source of confidence for me is past accomplishments. As a teenager, I had quite low confidence and spent a lot of time with my computer instead of, for example, going outside and getting a life. However, that investment (the cost here is time … and a social life) is now producing results for me. The confidence I picked up in learning to do something I couldn’t previously do can now be applied to learning things I can’t do at the moment but would like to do. For example, learning how to make money. I learnt PHP, I can learn to make money.

Build these assets in your life and they will never stop producing confidence for you. The trick is to use that momentum to go on to the next thing. Regularly remind yourself of your past achievements. (If you feel you don’t have any achievements, think again. I’ve learnt that that what I look for, I usually find. Don’t look at your life expecting to find failures, look expecting to find successes.)

* If you use this link to buy this book, I get some money from it. It doesn’t cost you any more, but it does help me to keep writing this blog!

You’ve got to love your brain! It’s the organ that has the most fascinating function in your body: it’s the computer that runs … you! Why punish it by forcing it to work in ways it doesn’t want to?

Found this video just now. I think it’s not only effective and efficient, but also beautiful — the best ideas embrace form and function. I will certainly be using this in the future! (I already take notes that are full of pictures and decorative lettering.)

Exams: How To Mind Map With Tony Buzan

Hope you enjoyed it. For me, it’s back to boring audio editing. But life is still good!

It’s ridiculously simple: stop watching TV.

I have nothing against TV. There are many great programmes that can expand your mind, challenge and inspire you, present new opportunities and show you things in a new way. The trouble is watching TV doesn’t teach you to think.

Your brain is a learning machine. You never stop learning. There’s no choice about the matter: you automatically learn, whether you pursue it or not. The choice comes in what you learn.

If you don’t take control of what you learn, you learn at random. You learn some good things, and some bad, but there’s no direction or theme to what you learn. And by learning, I don’t mean just learning facts or theories, I mean habits of thought, points of view, skills. Random learning is great for trivia collecting, but that’s about it. All you will do is turn your mind into a museum of curiosities.

You have to direct your learning because your mind is what guides your life. If it’s full of good things, your life will be good. If it’s full of rubbish, your life will be rubbish!

The king of all the things you could possibly learn, and the skill I most try to develop, is creativity. Creativity allows you to find the beautiful solution to an ugly situation. Right now, creative problem solving is making people rich in the midst of a recession — right now, as you are reading this. Doesn’t that annoy you? With creativity you can turn being fired into the best thing that ever happened. You can take your broken past and turn it into a beautiful future.

The problem with watching TV is that it doesn’t train your brain to do anything but take in. Did you know that your brain is less active when you watch TV then when you’re asleep? It goes fully into input-mode. It’s almost trance like. There’s no other state that I can think of that’s like it. Maybe being a passenger in a car comes close — I always completely zone out, and have to really concentrate to make conversation. But even then I’m thinking.

While you’re in this trance-like state, advertisers can implant things straight into your unconscious mind. Most adverts are designed to make a brand feel cool, or friendly, or helpful. Advertisers rarely sell things based on hard facts: they go for subjective feelings. This particular cleaning product loves your kids and wants them to be healthy. This particular food is traditional (even though it’s sold online and is made in a factory). This university is better because it’s established and full of “heritage” (or is it stuffy and old-fashioned, while the glorified polytechnic will give you more practical skills?).

The other thing with TV is that it gives the impression that you’re doing something (being the hero, winning the race, being a business success … whatever) when really you’re just watching other people doing that — or pretending to do that! No matter how much 24 I watch, I will never be Jack Bauer. No matter how much Secret Millionaire I watch, I am not helping disadvantaged people with my millions!

Simply switching off the TV forces you to find other things to do, think new things, meet new people. It’s painful at first. You have to face up to the fact that you don’t know what to do with free time! But it gets easier as time goes on. And you get better the more you do it.

If you want a better job, don’t spend your evenings in front of the tube. Read blogs like Escape From Cubicle Nation and Ittybiz and Entrepeneurs-Journey.com. If you want to improve your relationships, go out more! Learn the art of small talk that leads to great conversations. It feels awkward at first, but it gets better. If you want to learn how to cook, buy Delia Smith’s book — don’t just watch her on TV!

If you can’t rid yourself of TV altogether (and who does?), just set a goal that you’ll spend an hour or two doing something creative before you veg out. And TV isn’t completely wrong. When I can’t sleep, watching TV is great for closing down the insomnia circus* that seems to visit my head from time to time.

Free your mind. Switch off the TV!

* Damn, I was funny back then! When did I get all serious on this blog!?

There’s a saying, “Work smarter, not harder”. It means that with a little thought, you can make a process more efficient and reduce the amount of hard work you have to do. I totally agree with this statement, it makes perfect sense and I love making things more efficient.

The trouble is it only works so far: there will always be hard work to do.

One of my dreams is to be wealthy. This is a dream which has arisen from my reading various blogs and books about business and wealth. I would call this a “secondary” dream. It comes from a love of companies like Google, who put their users first, and Fog Creek Software, who really do care about their customers and employees. I read Seth Godin‘s blog about marketing, and Joel Spolsky‘s blog about running a [very] successful software company, and I love their approach. And it happens to be profitable, too. It’s the genius, the cleverness, the ethics that inspire me to become wealthy. It’s the route to wealth that interests me, not the wealth itself.

There is a temptation to think that their wisdom and genius will waft from the screens and into my life, kind of by osmosis. And in a way it will. Seth’s thinking has, in a small way, become a part of my thinking. Joel’s ethics have become my ethics too. But reading will only ever produce things “in theory”. It’s only when you get moving that dreams start to become reality. That’s the difference between success and mediocrity: successful people did something about it. The big wide world of practicality is so much more concrete than the infinite, though unreal, world of imagination.

I’m naturally biased towards the theoretical. I daydream. I did well academically. I love reading. I love thinking. These things are great, I think they’re very important, but I heard someone say that A grade students end up working for C grade students, and it made me realise that where the “real world” is concerned, theoretical knowledge is inferior to practical knowledge. That’s humbling for intellectual people.

I still think there’s an important place for the theoretical. There is incredible beauty in the workings of, say, the cell, or animal behaviour, or the life cycle of a slime mould (seriously, look it up, it’s astounding). It’s just that when it comes to business, that kind of approach holds too tightly to ideas. Business thinking is broad, simple and quick, whereas intellectual thinking is deep and slow.

So to take it back to my original point, there’s only so much that “work smarter” can do. You can only optimise to certain degree. The person who spends their whole time thinking about it will always lose out to the person who spends their whole time doing something about it. Action beats inaction.

Memory is a basic thinking skill. It’s the ability to hold information in your head. It works in the long term and the short term. In the long term, if you can remember different ideas (over months and years) you can build on them and refine them. In the short term, if you can hold a lot of ideas in your head at once you can process more. You can see links between two different ideas where you haven’t before. Heightened mental bandwidth means stronger thinking. This is true for philosophical thinking but practical thinking as well: you will be a better problem solver if you have a better memory.

I’m going to tell you about a mental exercise that will help increase your memory. Not only does this improve your memory, but it’s also a really useful way of taking notes if you don’t have any paper to hand. It uses your brain’s natural abilities, which means you’re working with your brain and not against it.

You recall images much better and for much longer than anything else — words and numbers especially. So, to remember lists, for each number, get an image that you associate with that number. The more natural the association the better since you’ll recall it more easily. These images will become “hooks” on which you can hang the things you want to remember. My list is below. Notice how the image is logically linked to the number it represents. I’ve also made the images as emotionally striking as possible: either funny, or scary, or pleasant. The more striking it is, the better you remember.

1. The sun (there’s only one sun)
2. A pair of eyes
3. Buses (you wait for ages and then three come along at once)
4. Picnic blanket (four corners)
5. A hand (five fingers)
6. A dice (the 6 face, obviously)
7. A calender (7 days in a week)
8. Spider
9. The month of September (Visualise as going back to school)
10. Two hands

It’s best to choose your own images. The process of choosing means it’s a) customised to you and b) you have thought more about each image so you’re more likely to remember it. Concentration is the key to this method.

Use the same image for the number each time you use this method. This helps to cement things in your brain. The beauty of this method is that you can expand it as necessary for lists of more than ten, using whatever images you need for the extra numbers.

The next step is to associate the items on the list with your number images. This is done by somehow combining the two images. Again, the funnier or more emotionally striking the better. Also, you need to really concentrate as you make the image. Using your imagination, look at the detail, and focus. The concentration makes you remember it better.

Let’s take an example. If you had a shopping list of bacon, onions, eggs and apples you might remember it this way:

1. Bacon frying on the sun
2. Eyes crying because you’re chopping onions
3. Three buses full of eggs (or three giant “egg buses”)
4. A picnic where everyone has giant apples instead of heads.

To recall the list, you picture the sun — and you immediately remember the bacon. Think of eyes, and you remember onions. This method takes a bit of concentration, but you’ll find that it’s very powerful. You’ll be able to remember lists for days or even weeks.

If you use this method regularly, you will improve your memory to the extent that you don’t need to consciously visualise everything. Your brain will have learnt how to memorise things much more efficiently. When this is the case, you’ve increased your mental “bandwidth”. You’ll also have exercised your imagination, which makes life so much more fun. And you’ll be able to add things up more easily in your head. So many benefits!

I am a thinker. You may or may not have noticed. And I’ve been thinking about being a thinker and I think there are five things that you need — if you’re a thinker.

Output

Instead of just thinking, do something with your thoughts. Don’t just let them rattle around your head. Write them down. Keep a blog. Outputting your thoughts helps refine them and develop them. If you can articulate them, you can understand them better.

Discussion

Other people are a really great input for new ideas and points of view. Other people see things differently, and you can expand the way you think. Learning new things is the whole reason for thinking in the first place!

Exposing your ideas to other people helps cut away what’s rubbish, and it gives you a more objective view of your own thinking. There’s a real danger of becoming pretentious and getting lost in your own head. Discussion keeps your mind open.

Non-thinker friends!

Non-thinkers are almost the best type of different viewpoint! Don’t be annoyed by people who don’t think about stuff as much as you do: you can learn loads from them. Don’t be tempted to see them as shallow, either. Sometimes being “deep” leads you to being depressed and self-absorbed, and the best remedy for that is fun. Keep in mind that thinking is a “side-project” for life. If you live entirely out of your head, you’re not living life to the full.

Thinking time

I find that thinking recharges me. It’s one of my strengths, and I want to develop it (another reason for the first three things on this list). But thinking time is really important for everything. If you run a business, have a family, want to improve your career, whatever.

Plan it. Do it deliberately.

Know yourself

Learn how best to release your own thinking power. When do you think best, day time or evening? In busyness or quiet?

For me, it’s what I’m doing that affects how I think the most. If I’m doing nothing, I can’t think. I feel claustrophobic and stale. My thoughts just idle and go nowhere — unless I can write copious amounts. I need a sense of movement. Unsurprisingly then, I find a connection between my feet and my brain. If I’m walking, my thoughts flow freely and naturally.

If I’m walking and suddenly stop, it’s like hitting a wall: my thoughts scatter. If I change direction, or go a different way to my usual route, I find my thoughts change direction too. Funny, but that’s how my mind works!

So those are my top tips on thinking. Hope they help :)