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Adaptive Thinking: How High-Performers Think When It Matters Most | Nick Wignall
Negative Visualization Routine
- Generate a list of potential obstacles or unanticipated setbacks that could occur during the performance.
- Practice visualizing and rehearsing the performance in your mind, and during each practice session, work in one of the obstacles, being sure to visualize how you might feel in response to it and what action you would ideally take.
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Key Ideas
"Teaching" Sleep
During WWII, the U.S. military realized that if fighter pilots didn't get sleep, their poor decisions had dire consequences. Their mishaps included errors that resulted in their being shot down--or...
Combat Pilots Sleeping Hacks
- Get into a comfortable position, wherever you are, like a bed, or a couch.
- Close your eyes.
- Relax your facial muscles, all of them, as it sends a signal to the brain that all is well. This makes your breathing slow and deep.
- Drop your shoulders, and let them completely loose.
- Feel your legs go limp, sinking and getting heavier, both of them, one by one.
- Turn off your brain for 10 seconds, just like rebooting an iPhone.
- Avoid thoughts at all costs. It is just 10 seconds, so anything from visualizing something or chanting will do. If you drift towards thoughts, you will start to activate your muscles automatically.
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Key Ideas
Divergent Thinking
Is the ability to generate many ideas or solutions from a single idea or piece of information.
It’s thought to be one of, if not the most, important factor in creativity.
Convergent Thinking
Is the ability to take many pieces of information or data and generate one solution.
It is largely taught and encouraged in schools and workplaces.
Exercising Divergent Thinking
- The Many Uses Exercise: Pick an ordinary object, set a timer for 5 minutes and try to come up with as many alternative uses for a paperclip as you can.
- 10 New Ideas: Every day for a week, try to come up with 10 new ideas within a specific topic or category.
- Daily Headlines: Imagine that your day was a news story in the New York Times. What would the headline be?
- Articles on Trial: Challenge the conclusion of articles you read by coming up with one question you’d like to ask the author.
- Start to notice your automatic thoughts and generate alternatives to them.
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Key Ideas
Breaks keep us from getting bored
The human brain just wasn’t built for the extended focus we ask of it these days.
The fix for this unfocused condition is simple—all we need is a brief interruption (aka a break) to ge...
Breaks and brain connections
Our brains have two modes:
- focused mode, which we use when we’re doing things like learning something new, writing or working) and
- diffuse mode, which is our more relaxed, daydreamy mode when we’re not thinking so hard.
The mind solves its stickiest problems while daydreaming—something you may have experienced while driving or taking a shower.
Breaks help us reevaluate our goals
When you work on a task continuously, it’s easy to lose focus and get lost in the weeds. In contrast, following a brief intermission, picking up where you left off forces you to take a few seconds to think globally about what you’re ultimately trying to achieve.