How to Think Like a Fool #25: Destroy

IMAGINE: Destroy
To imagine is a creative act, so this section ends with imagining the destruction of your project in an effort to start over. From Humpty Dumpty's shell, you build a wall nobody can fall off of.

For fools, this is joyful and playful destruction, truly letting the imagination run wild. Think of the anarchic chaos produced by the Marx Brothers, especially Harpo.

You use this approach when you get really stuck. When your ideas have become frozen, stuffy, tired. You've made a house with wooden blocks, and now you knock it over to build a castle, or just for fun.

Throw your first draft in the fireplace, and rewrite without the influence of that draft.

Think: What would this problem or solution look like if I were to dramatically destroy it? How can I best wreck it? What can I do with the pieces or what if I just start over from scratch?

Saturday: How to Think Like a Fool #26: PLAY: Make Fun

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How to Think Like a Fool #24: Worry about Everything

IMAGINE: Worry about Everything!
“What if” is a powerful start to a question that is also an answer to the imagination. It allows you to suspend judgement about the impossible, fantasize, misremember, and exaggerate. It also allows fools to worry about everything that could possibly go wrong, often based on selected facts. “What if this were to happen, or this, or this?”

WARNING: Worrying about everything may cause procrastination, paralysis, nervousness, impotence, heart failure, global warming, and excessive worrying.

So how do fools make worrying work for them?

First, don't worry about everything all the time. Pick a time and a place, set a timer, and worry for a short period. Write all the worries down. They may give you information to use later, when you aren't so stressed. Look for the absurdities in the worries. Make them more absurd with exaggeration until they can't be taken seriously anymore.

Imagining all the things that can go wrong gives you a list of problems to fix with foolishly clever inventions. What a great source of potential inspiration! My first silent movie was about imagining what would happen if a guy who went to change a light bulb couldn't get down from the chair and had to figure out how to survive while living up there. (The Guy Who Lived on the Chair, available on DVD with “The Guy Who” Movies).

The fool's secret is that it's possible to worry and be physically relaxed at the same time. Then the worries lose their power and action can be taken.

Think: What if everything that could go wrong went worse? What else could go wrong? What else? What am I going to do about it?

Tomorrow: How to Think Like a Fool #25: Destroy

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How to Think Like a Fool #23: Misremember the Past

IMAGINE: Misremember the Past
If fools fantasize the future to change the future, they also misremember the past to change the present.

Obstacles in the way of success may be past rejections, fears, failures, and other supposedly negative experiences.

Research continues to show that memory isn't a perfectly clear reflection of reality and can be distorted after the fact. So if the memories that hold you back aren't completely accurate and are malleable, why not revise them to move forward.

A fools trips on the sidewalk—no, just practicing a new dance move. Dropped a juggling ball—never happened, problem solved.

In his hilarious, moving, and intelligent one-man show Sleepwalk with Me, comedian Mike Birbiglia talks a lot about the dangers of denial, but has also found it helpful at times:

"I really think to become a stand-up comedian, you have to be delusional. If you weren't, then you wouldn't continue, because there's so much failure at the outset that you have to tell yourself that it's going well when it's not."
link: Mike Birbiglia | | A.V. Club

Re-imagine your memories. Loosen your attachment to them. Tell yourself a new story.

Today I went for a bike ride, and when I had just started up the street, something felt funny. I looked down at my feet and saw that I was wearing my house slippers. I turned around and went home and put on real shoes as my wife laughed and laughed.

That's how I remember it, but I'm going to misremember that I was actually wearing big fuzzy Bugs Bunny slippers, and I didn't notice it until one of the bunny ears got stuck in the chain. Which kept me from getting hit by the truck that went through a stop sign. Those slippers saved my life!

Now I'm not so embarrassed.

Think: What memories are getting in the way? How can I misremember them?

Tomorrow: How to Think Like a Fool #24: Worry about Everything

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How to Think Like a Fool #22: Picture an Audience

IMAGINE: Picture an Audience
RIPPO the Fool works on a project at home, alone. With 1500 people watching, applauding, laughing, and cheering. At the end, RIPPO gets a standing ovation.

All in RIPPO's head.

As a solo performer, I find the presence of an audience changes everything.

On the negative side, unresponsive audiences suck the life out of a show like a herd of Roombas (or it can be just one scowling person sitting in the front row. Or maybe the show sucked first).

I can practice a juggling feat flawlessly in my rehearsal studio, but choke on it with self-consciousness in front of an audience. At the funeral for my vaudeville consultant Jay Marshall, a sign on his casket read, "Not the first time I died."

Most of the time, though, audiences give me energy, immediate feedback, spontaneous moments to react to, and a state of play that inspires me to improvise ideas I might never have thought up or tried in rehearsal. So why not harness this when not performing?

While working on something challenging, in your mind's eye see an audience watching you, applauding your successes and choices. You act as if you are performing, demonstrating each step for them. This is an ideal audience, made up of the most forgiving friends and fans. Your nervousness energizes you. You show off, because under the influence of showing off, people do dumb but brilliant things. Build suspense. Entertain them. Wow them!

Your grand finale is the solution to your problem.

THINK: How big is my imaginary audience? Who are they? How are they reacting? What do they like and don't like?

Tomorrow: How to Think Like a Fool #23: Misremember the Past

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How to Think Like a Fool #21: Fantasize the Future

IMAGINE: Fantasize the Future
When fools are accused of procrastinating, wasting time, just sitting there, and doing nothing, they whip out their printed and laminated copies of this article:

“Contrary to the notion that daydreaming is a sign of laziness, letting the mind wander can actually let the parts of the brain associated with problem-solving become active, a new study finds.”
link: Daydream away — it’s a workout for your brain - Behavior- msnbc.com

But the concept of daydreaming contains more than just mind-wandering. Fools guide their daydreams as future fantasies where, unlike the Murphy's Law which they are tied to in the real world, in their foolish minds, whatever can go right, will go right.

With this Fool Tool, you give gentle prompts to your imaginings, just enough to get them going. With practice, your visualizations take on a life of their own, presenting clues and answers that solve mysteries.

Or at least give you a break.

Think: What would it look like if I solved this problem creatively, beautifully, meaningfully, fantastically? How did I get there? What if I let my mind wander along that path?

Tomorrow: How to Think Like a Fool #22: Picture an Audience

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How to Think Like a Fool #20: Exaggerate the Details

IMAGINE: Exaggerate the Details
Exaggerating helps to find problems or make things more difficult. It's also a great way to break out of a stuck mindset and push yourself to fix the unbroken.

If you've got one, what if you had one hundred, or if it's big, what if it was miniscule? The answers to these questions and others like them lead to new paths of imaginary exploration, and if put into action, will take more work, but will be harder to imitate.

The EepyBird Guys may not have been the first to create a geyser by putting Mentos in a bottle of Diet Coke, but they used the power of exaggeration (and inspired choreography) to create an internet-and-beyond phenomenon with 101 two-liter bottles of Diet Coke and 523 Mentos. For those few people who still haven't seen it:

"At EepyBird, we always try to take things further than any sane person would, so we spent the next eight months developing different effects, building up to Experiment #137... As we kept developing new fountain effects, we realised we had to try something really huge."
—Fritz Grobe from: The brains behind: EepyBird.com - .net magazine

Although I have uncovered a top-secret photo of EepyBird guy Stephen Voltz that may show where he truly gets his ideas:

Think: How can I exaggerate details of my problem? What if I multiply, shrink, stretch, enlarge, or somehow overly alter aspects of the solution?

Tomorrow: How to Think Like a Fool #21: Fantasize the Future

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How to Think Like a Fool #19: Borrow Ideas

IMAGINE: Borrow Ideas
It's been said (or paraphrased) that “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” But a fool borrows ideas just long enough to imaginatively transform them until they unrecognizable. Then the original idea can be returned to its owner before the police are called.

You use an idea as a starting point, a beginning of a journey that involves all the other FoolThink concepts, finding variations on the idea, then variations on the variations, substituting parts, adding, combining, and finally, truly changing the idea.

Or even better, take a good idea from a discipline completely outside your own and figure out how to apply it to your problem. Abstract the concept enough to be fleshed out with your dilemma's specifics.

Here's an example of scientists borrowing from the field of food preparation:

“Australian researchers have uncovered the science behind tossing the perfect pizza dough in a quest to make smaller, more efficient motors for use in microrobotics.”
Pizzamimicry Can Lead to Improved Micro-Motors

And don't just borrow good ideas—borrow bad ones and fix them.

Think: Where can I find an idea to borrow? Which idea will I borrow? What can I do with it? What else? What then? When will I return it?

See also my article/virtual workshop: How to Steal Material Without Getting Caught

Tomorrow: How to Think Like a Fool #20: Exaggerate the Details

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