Novels, J.D. Salinger wrote, grow in the dark. By that, he meant that true creativity comes from the subconscious mind, from allowing ideas time to percolate below our conscious awareness. It’s not just novels, though, that spring forth from the subconscious mind. So do all great ideas, innovations and insights.
Creative ideas don’t come from sitting in a boardroom, at a desk or staring at a computer. These activities – or non-activities – signal our thinking minds to activate, and the thinking mind can’t innovate or create; it can only analyze, strategize and replicate old ideas. We humans are creatures of habit: If we sit in the same place (literally or figuratively), we’ll come up with the same old ideas.
True creativity and innovation come from looking at things differently – and that can only happen when the thinking mind is out of the way, when the subconscious can bubble up and offer its contributions.
The subconscious takes in 20 million bits of information per second – and this is a conservative estimate, from biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton (I’ve heard numbers up to 40 billion bits per second). The conscious mind takes in 2,000 bits per second and can process a maximum 40 bits of information in the same time. We know so, so, so much more than we are aware of knowing. The subconscious, not the intellect (which comes from…
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