Hack Your Subconscious for Better Ideas
Zack Freedman Zack Freedman
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 Published On Feb 15, 2021

I tried to improve my intuition and made a how-to guide for ADD.
Keysight University goes live March 15th! Learn more at http://bit.ly/ZFreedKeys

I've been working on a new project, a pimped-out oscilloscope, and it got me thinking about my thinking. I realized that my brain works best as I shift between four distinct phases: inspiration, downtime, exploration, and action. I rely almost entirely on intuition, and this four-step strategy gives my subconscious the support it needs to carry me through crazy projects. I call it the IDEA cycle, and it might help you too.

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If good ideas just appear to you out of nowhere, it's not dumb luck - it's your intuition. It might feel out of control, but you can feed it the building blocks of your next breakthrough, give it space to work, watch its blind spots, and kick it into moving faster.

If you're struggling to come up with new ideas, suffering from writer's block, or want to beat burnout and rekindle your creativity, one or more of these steps could unstick you.
This is a bit of a personal video, so if you take advantage of my vulnerability to emotionally attack me... I had it coming.

📖 “The Happiness Hypothesis” by Jonathan Haidt - https://amzn.to/3b8KE6X

Quick reference:
💡INSPIRATION - Passively gather raw material, the wider and deeper, the better. If you feel boxed in, your ideas seem uninspired, or you try to brute-force solutions, you could need more inspiration.

🏖 DOWNTIME - Disengage your conscious mind and let your subconscious run. Trust that you're still thinking during downtime - it's just outside your awareness. If your ideas are too loose, fragmented, and shallow, some downtime may help. Choose your downtime carefully - pick an activity that distracts you but doesn't need your full attention.

🕵️ EXPLORATION - Go looking for trouble and shore up the weaknesses that all minds share. Probabilities are the most critical, but timeframes and physical volumes are also hard to intuit. The more cognitive biases you can recognize, the stronger and more efficient your exploration. If you repeatedly run into unexpected challenges, have bad luck, or make poor estimates, explore your ideas more thoroughly.

🏁 ACTION - Jump into the fray to see what you've come up with. Don't wait for your subconscious to notify you - the only way to check is to try. If you've been waiting for that eureka moment, just get rolling - you'll probably have it right then and there.

This video is sponsored by Keysight Technologies. They also provided my spiffy new bench scope as well as the gratuitously expensive one I'm ripping apart.

Sparkly sound effect is from zapsplat.com.

Soundtrack (all Creative Commons):
"Serene" - Aritus
"Brother" - Gramatik
"Pina Colada II (Final)" - Aritus
"Get it Right" - Aritus and Fibre
"Cool Thieves" - Gramatik

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