Aha, its December, and 2007 will soon be past! The figure 12 in the date brings with it a Pavlovian stimulation of thoughts: vacations, parties, resolutions, change of calendars and so on. The thoughts are myiad and rather unrelated; but with a common underlying theme highlighting a
transition.
The phenomenon of rather unrelated things pointing to a commonality does not seem to be rare. Infact, the very reason I sat down to write today is a recent experience I had with this phenomenon. When it strikes, you start feeling its omnipresence. It's like someone putting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together and when its done, its
Eureka!
I do not seem to be able trace back its origin, but I feel it's everywhere already. A mind-blowing
TED talk again was a source of inspiration. It talks about creativity and how education systems around the world are designed to kill it. It's a brilliant talk and I highly recommend watching it.
Then came a refreshing movie that potrays a character who believes in making decisions based on what her heart says and is ready to assume the responsibility of the consequences. For those who have not guessed the movie yet, its 'Jab We Met' and the focus is on Kareena's character which turns out to be my favorite in the movie.
I have this really bad habbit of leaving books half-read and so seems to be happening to 'Creativity' by a couple of brand consultants. Nevertheless, my recent half-baked interest in branding made the book catch my eye in the book store I frequent. This book is a compilation of 20 innovators' interviews. All of them talk about creativity itself ofcourse, but they also emphasize the important role passion played in the path to their success.
All these seemingly unrelated things seem to be pointing us to less-explored 'heart-thinking'. Let me try to elaborate on why I say this. Creativity is about thinking 'out of the box'. Our education and experience in life continuously pumps in conventions and sets of 'impossibles' into us and develops what is known as 'knowledge inertia'. Conventionally, by education, we are trained to use our brains to do the thought processing and this is directly related to knowledge inertia. That's when heart-thinking or thinking 'out of the box' comes to rescue. Talking about the movie, the 'hearty' character seems to be able to find some innovative solutions to the male protagonist's (Shahid's) problems in life just based on different thinking. Conventional or 'brain' thinking keeps pushing us into the trench of the impossibles and everything starts appearing complex. The interviewees in the book strongly hold their passion responsible for their creative success and it wont be un-natural to relate our passions wholly to our hearts. Most people are not following their passions today (e.g. I am not a guitarist, Om is not a percussionist, Enigma is not working on english literature and Quest is not a vocalist!) just because the worldy conventions enforce us to take brain-based decisions diminishing the voice of the heart. All the chunks of the phenomenon are therefore, in my opinion, gelling into the common theme of thinking straight from your heart.
As Sir Ken Robinson has brilliantly pointed out, its our socio-academic system to blame which repeatedly discourages heart-thinking and promotes brain-thinking. Infact, more often than not, heart-thinkers become outcasts and finally its their success which gives them a re-entry and invariably at a much superior level of honor and recognition. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the Google guys(Larry-Sergey) would have probably just been ordinary names in some telephone directory if they had brain-thought of the school degree as the whole and soul of their life.
I think it is an important theme for all of us to spend some time pondering upon. I do not advocate replacing what education prompts to do by heart-thinking totally, but I certainly promote the idea of giving 'heart-thinking' a fair chance in our lives.
So, what does your heart say today?
