Can you exercise your brain the way you might carefully hone a group of muscles? Science suggests that you can — though’ll need a different set of tools for this than resistance bands or kettle bells. And if you’re looking to make yourself more creative, it turns out there are a number of steps you can take in order to make your brain more receptive to certain things.
In a new article for CNBC, Sarah Stein Greenberg of Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design offered some tips on how “to train your brain to see and notice opportunities.” Greenberg’s article focuses in on three different actions that you can take in order to get a better sense of what’s truly happening in a specific workplace or geographic location. These are the same set of tools that Greenberg and her colleagues share with the students they teach.
One of them involves “shadowing” — in other words, following someone around throughout their daily routine, and engaging in the same activities that they do, then asking them a series of questions about their day. Greenberg notes that “[y]ou might get the most inspiration shadowing a non-traditional expert” — citing both maintenance staff and newly-hired employees as examples.
The other two tips are more focused around research. One involves looking at a photograph and working to piece together what’s happening in the image and outside of its borders. This, Greenberg writes, can help you “understand how much detail is part of your daily life.” The other tip involves examining a problem by looking into how similar problems have been solved by other people — and doing more research to see if those solutions apply in a different context.
Greenberg’s article is a fascinating and enlightening read. And it also serves as a reminder that these tips aren’t simply designed to be done once — they’re more about building habits and renewing themselves regularly, and finding your own daily and weekly practice.
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