Dieting: The New Rule Starts Well

The new rule I introduced yesterday “Single Course Only” showed its worth yesterday as this morning my target weight had dropped by 1.5 lbs. I’m now only 1.5 lbs behind where I would have been if I had not taken a week’s break at the beginning of the month.

There’s another reason for celebration: today I have lost overall 1 stone* since starting the diet at the beginning of December. That represents a steady loss of just under 1 lb per week.

* That’s 14 lbs or 6.4 kilos for those of you who don’t speak the Queen’s English!

Employ Yourself

If a friend were to suggest that they paid you to come in a couple of afternoons a week to keep their books for them, or clean their house, or do their filing, and you had the time to spare, would you find it difficult to do?

You probably feel that you have better things to do with your time, but I am sure that if you did decide to help them you would have no difficulty doing the job.

So how come your own accounts are in disorder, your house is in chaos, your filing is behindhand? (They’re not? — Ok, I believe you!)

Why not employ someone else to come in and sort these things out for you? or better still why not employ YOURSELF to do it? You would be able to do the job perfectly easily if you were doing it for someone else, so why is it so difficult when it comes to doing it for yourself?

So for instance you might employ yourself as your own bookkeeper for a couple of afternoons a week. Agree your times of work with yourself. And go to work on your accounts exactly as if you were going to work for someone else. So if you were being paid to do a couple of afternoons a week for someone else, you would keep those time slots blocked out in your diary and wouldn’t allow anything else to interfere with them (or you would if you wanted to keep your job!). So do the same for yourself. And you wouldn’t be tempted to do anything else while you were working either. Do the same for yourself.

You can reinforce the illusion by working in a different place from where you usually work when you are being “yourself”. Or dress differently. Whatever will give you the necessary distance from the task. When I act as my own accountant I often take all the books down to the local public library, where I am completely isolated from my normal distractions.

You can give yourself a grand title like “Director of Finances”. And you can extend this principle to being your own “Director of Marketing”, “Director of Operations” — whatever you like.

Dieting - a new rule

I’ve decided that in my list of rules, there is too fast a progression to starting skipping meals. After all the idea is that skipping meals should be an occasional exception, not the norm.

So I have decided to try out a new rule which comes between “No Sweets” and “Skip 1 Meal”. The new rule is:

Single Course only

This means that you are only allowed one course at a meal. And no, you’re not allowed to pile your plate to the ceiling, because the “Small Portions” rule will be in effect at the same time!

I’ve been thinking of introducing this rule for some time, but it was only today that I was in a position to try it out. So far, so good!

[See here for the other rules]

Parkinson's Law

C. Northcote Parkinson wrote one of the most famous of all business laws in his book Parkinson’s Law:

“Work expands to fill the time available”.

This law can be reframed to cover a host of other situations as well, such as “Expenditure expands to fill the income available”, “Files expand to fill the storage space available”, etc,etc.

As a life coach my biggest challenge was usually not to get my clients to do things, but to stop them from doing things — so many things that they don’t have time for what is really important to them. We all tend to rush around in a continual state of stress, feeling that we can never call our lives our own. Yet the horrible truth is that we could probably do our work in a fraction of the time it is taking us at the moment — and do it more effectively.

How can we do this?

The first step is to reduce the time available. If you are consistently working long hours, then try shortening them drastically. This will force you to concentrate on the things that are important. (It will also give you time to live the rest of your life).

Second, apply this principle to individual projects as well as to your overall work. Give yourself as short a deadline as possible to finish each project and see what happens!

If you don’t believe this will work, consider the following scenario. Imagine you have kept all day free to finish a report. You have nothing else to do that day but work on it. What usually happens in such a case? Answer: you spend all day working hard at verifying figures and perfecting the layout and finally get the report finished at about 6 p.m.

But consider this: what would happen if your boss called you at the beginning of the day and said: “Sorry, change of plan, I need the report on my desk in two hours time.” What would happen? You’d have the report on her desk in two hours time, that’s what!

Third, keep asking yourself the question “Why am I doing this this way?” and even better “Why am I doing this at all?” Go on a hunt for useless time-wasting practices that serve no purpose. There are all sorts of reasons we may be doing things in a quite unnecessarily long-winded way. We may be doing them that way because we think they ought to be done that way or because we think other people would expect us to do them that way or because they’ve always been done that way or because that was the way our predecessor did them or our colleagues do them. And of course we may be doing them that way because being busy gives us the perfect excuse for not facing up to the major issues that we need to be looking at.

Exercise:

Take a recurring work situation that you have difficulty finding time for. It might be answering your email, dealing with paperwork, or catching up with your professional reading. Write as many endings as you can to the sentence “A way I might deal with my [email/paperwork/reading/etc.] in less time and more effectively is … “

This exercise is best done straight off the top of your head without thinking too much. It doesn’t matter if the answers make sense or not. The aim is merely to get your thinking moving. Aim to write between six and twelve endings. Repeat it every day for five days and you should have some really useful ideas.

How to Be Creative

I guess some people are naturally creative and some are not, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t all improve our creativity. So here is a list of some of the best ways to improve your creativity:

Creativity comes out of new combinations. It’s very rare to produce something which is completely new in every respect. Creativity is much more commonly the result of bringing together two or more existing ideas and combining them in a new way.

Creativity comes out of perspiration. If you want to have new ideas then it’s important to keep working at them. Inspiration comes to those who are actively engaged in a problem, not to those who are just sitting back waiting for the big idea to come to them.

Creativity comes out of knowledge and experience. This is closely related to the previous two. The person who will have the most creative ideas about a subject is the person who knows it back to front.

Creativity comes out of questioning. There is a danger that people who know a subject well become wedded to “the way it’s always been done”. This is not a bad thing when that way is built on years of knowledge and experience. But the person who can bring a “new mind” to the subject will frequently see things which the old hands can’t see because they are blinded by familiarity.

Creativity comes out of restrictions. It’s much easier to be creative when the terms and boundaries have been defined closely. The closer you define the question the more likely you are to be able to answer it.

Creativity comes out of dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction with the way things are at present is one of the keys to creativity. But beware - this dissatisfaction can express itself in destructive ways instead of creative ways.

Creativity comes out of changing one thing. Often the key to creativity is to list the various factors involved and experiment with doing just one thing different.

Have you got any ideas to add to this list?

Dieting: The ratchet starts to take effect

In my post about dieting just over a week ago I described how I was going to introduce a new idea called the “Rachet Effect”. So how have I got on with it?

The answer is that my target weight has gone down 1.5 lbs since last week - half a pound more than it would have under the previous system of an unvarying rate of decrease. But (and it’s a big but) this all happened towards the end of the week.  Here’s how it panned out :

Sunday: over target weight, 1 rule

Monday: over target, 2 rules 

Tuesday: over target, 3 rules

Wednesday: over target, 4 rules

Thursday: on target, 4 rules

Friday: target drops by 0.5 lbs, 3 rules

Saturday: over the new target, 4 rules

Sunday: target drops by 1 lb, 3 rules

So I seem to have reached a stage where having three or four rules is producing a weight loss. These rules are No Second Helpings, No Snacking, Nothing Sweet and finally (on alternate days) Small Portions.

Remember this is just how it has worked out over the last week - it may not stay that way. In fact the diet as it is now constituted should continue to respond to how my metabolism is working at the time.

Correspondence Received

Mark,

Its no exaggeration to say that Get Everything Done and Do it Tomorrow have totally changed my life.

I assumed I was a reasonably bright guy who just wasn’t much good at getting things done. With phrases like “he is not a completer finisher” and “he is great at the ideas, just no good at seeing them through” ringing in my ears from various appraisals, I figured it was worth a shot. Your book, as I am sure you don’t need telling, hits the nail on the head. So many time-management systems.. but none actually work.

Your books have made me efficient when I am working, got me started when I am not, and cherishing both my attention and time far more than I ever have done before.

I was just mid-way through a report I’ve been putting off writing for some time. Finally I got it started thanks to a checklist and some 5 minute bursts (just creating a blank document and just saving it with the right filename was the first). Now its nearly complete, my 10 minute timer just beeped, and although I was keen to carry on typing, I’ve stopped mid-sentence to thank you…

I just thought my character was flawed and that was what life was gonna be like, thanks for showing me it isn’t.

best regards,

Andy (a massive fan)

Andy Roberts, IT Consultant

[Quoted by permission]

Great FireWall of China

I see that according to the website http://greatfirewallofchina.org/ my website is blocked in China. I can’t imagine why that would be. If anyone in China can actually read this, perhaps you would let me know!

Dieting: The Ratchet Effect Update

The first two days of the new system have been a bit inauspicious. So far I have gained 1.5 lbs and have two rules in effect. But not to worry - what I expect will happen is that I will stabilise at a number of rules which will keep my weight slowly declining. I hope that it will be not too high up the scale!

Blog Posting by Email

Squarespace has just introduced a new facility by which I can make blog postings by e-mail. This is my first attempt - if you can read it, then it’s worked.

I’m wondering though if blogging by e-mail has a different dynamic. I know that when I write e-mails to people I tend to write in a different style to how I write when I’m writing an article. Will blogging by e-mail result in much difference to what I put on the blog? I wonder.

Dieting: Introducing the Ratchet Effect

Now that I’ve started back on my diet I must confess that I am getting rather bored with it. Specifically it’s the rate of loss of 1 lb per week that’s boring me. It’s too unvarying. It also isn’t sensitive to what is going on in my body at any specific time. So for instance when I first started the diet back at the beginning of December 1lb per week was too slow. I was losing weight faster than that with hardly any effort and had to hold myself back. But a couple of months later it was too fast. To keep up I had to cut back on eating to a greater extent than I was prepared to put up with.

So I’m going to experiment with a different way of adjusting the daily target weight. To do this I am not going to have a pre-determined rate of loss, but instead will let my body arrive at it’s own rate of loss. I will employ the “ratchet effect” - movement is only allowed in one direction.

The method of dieting remains exactly the same, except that my aim each day is to stay at the current target weight. However whenever I go below the target weight, that weight becomes the new target weight.

Let’s see how that would work out. If I weight myself in at 200 lbs to commence with, 200 lbs becomes my target weight and my aim each day is to maintain myself at that target weight. Every day that my actual weight is above 200 lbs I add a rule. If my weight is exactly 200 lbs I keep the rules that I have (if any). Everything so far is exactly the same as before.

Here’s the difference. If my weight one day falls to 198 lbs, then I can take one rule off and the new target weight becomes 198 lbs. So each day the target weight can remain the same or decrease. What it can never do is increase.

I won’t really know how this will work out until I have tried it for a while. It seems to me that it will be more interesting than a regular decrease in target weight. Interest is one of the main motivating factors in keeping to a diet. Of course it is theoretically possible that I might remain at the same target weight for evermore, but I don’t think that is very likely. It may well result in a much slower rate of weight loss - but that’s better than giving up the diet because one’s body can’t keep up.

(Full details of the diet I am following can be found here.)

The Conditional Perfect

In my Spanish studies I have just started revising that rather obscure tense, the conditional perfect. I was amused to read the following description of this tense in my textbook, the excellent Spanish Verb Tenses by Dorothy Devney Richmond:

Of all the tenses, the conditional perfect holds the dubious honor of being the only one to express no action. It is the favorite tense of excuse makers. The conditional perfect is used to refer to an action that would have taken place, but did not because something got in the way or some specified condition was not met.

In any sentence containing the conditional perfect, there will always be an “if” or a “but” lurking about, either stated or implied. People whose verbiage contains a good deal of conditional perfect sentences most likely are those who don’t get a lot done and have loads of excuses for all they don’t do, for example:

I would have paid you, but I couldn’t find my chequebook

If it weren’t so difficult, I would have baked you a pie

As I read this, I came to the uncomfortable realisation that I am not immune to using the conditional perfect tense myself on occasions. So I took the opportunity to write out a few recent instances:

• I would have written this newsletter last week, but I was too busy finishing my book
• If it hadn’t rained so much, I would have cut the grass
• I would have recorded my teleclass, but I forgot to switch on the tape-recorder
• If I’d contacted the firm earlier, the confusion over my seminar would have been avoided.

Once I had done this I could see that all these statements occupy a sort of never-never land. They are in fact completely pointless since they describe nothing. The only things that could usefully be stated were:

• I didn’t write this newsletter last week
• I didn’t cut the grass
• I didn’t record the teleclass
• There was confusion over my seminar

Having stated the facts in this stark way, I then started asking the obvious question: “So what?” The replies to that question usually take a form like this:

• I didn’t write this newsletter last week, therefore I will schedule a specific period for it this week
• I didn’t cut the grass, therefore I will check regularly whether the grass is dry enough yet
• I didn’t record the teleclass, therefore I will see if anyone else did
• There was confusion over my seminar, therefore I will examine and improve the way I liaise with firms beforehand

Exercise:

You might like to try the exercise of writing down some some examples of how you have used the conditional perfect recently yourself. And then for each occasion strip out the excuse and ask yourself the question “So what?”

(This article was originally published in my newsletter several years ago)

It's Your Choice!

One of the abiding themes that I keep coming back to in my writing is that we choose our lives and our circumstances pretty much to fit in with our own unconscious desires and wants. We may often be unaware of our real motivation, but there are always some strong drives which are keeping us where we are. This is not to say that there aren’t circumstances over which we have no control but that in today’s prosperous modern world, as lived in by most of us, we have a much larger degree of control over almost every aspect of our lives than would have been imaginable to previous generations.

When there is something in my life which I want to change I find it is often a good starting point to admit that I chose it to be the way it is in the first place. So for instance if I am heavily in debt, I need to recognise that I am in debt because I have chosen to be in debt.

I said this to a friend of mine and her reply was “But surely there are many people who have no choice over whether to be in debt or not? They have been forced into debt by circumstances.”

She certainly had a point, but she was assuming that I meant that the decision to be in debt is always a bad choice. If someone has a choice between their family starving and being in debt or being homeless and being in debt, then being in debt is probably the best choice there is. But it’s still a choice.

The great thing is that once you have recognised that being in debt is your choice, then you have the freedom to change your choice.

So the first step to changing any life situation is to accept that you have chosen it:

“I am in debt because I have chosen to be in debt”

“My relationship is a disaster because I have chosen that it should be a disaster”

“My house is untidy because I have chosen that it should be untidy”

“I am overweight because I have chosen to be overweight”

Even in situations over which we seem to have no control, if we are honest with ourselves there are often many factors we have contributed ourselves. So if we are ill, we may have been leading an unhealthy life style. If we have a car accident it may be that we drive too fast or didn’t maintain the vehicle properly or weren’t paying attention, and so on. It helps to remember that the reason we are exploring our contribution is not so that we can make ourselves feel guilty but to help us to regain our power over the situation.

Now it’s a bit too big a jump for most of us to go straight from saying “I am in debt because I have chosen to be in debt” to saying “I am free of debt because I choose to be free of debt.”

No, with this sort of problem we need to sneak up on it a bit!

A good place to start is to look at why we chose to be in debt (or whatever) in the first place. To do this, write down the choice you made and then think up as many reasons as you can for having made it. Like this:

“I have chosen to be in debt because:

It was either that or not going on holiday this year

I don’t want to wait until I have enough money before enjoying the good things of life

Budgeting is too much like hard work

I hate doing the accounts

When I get depressed buying things makes me feel better

Credit cards make things so easy

Most of my income seems to go on taxation and the mortgage

etc. etc.”

Now we can try an exercise to see what it would take not to be in debt.

But wait a moment! This is usually the point at which our minds start rebelling. We have probably got strong resistance to the idea of getting out of debt (or whatever issue we are trying to resolve). Our minds are not going to let go of something so easily – after all we spend a lot of time and effort getting where we are!

A good way to switch off our rebellious mindset is to reassure it by saying something like: “I’m not planning to make the effort to get out of debt now, but if I did choose to I would….” Then think up as many endings as you can. Like this:

“I’m not planning to make the effort to get out of debt now, but if I did choose to I would:

• Draw up a list of how much I owe now
• Work out a budget
• Keep a record of my expenditure during the day
• Cut up my credit cards
• Start saving something every week
• See a debt counsellor

etc etc”

Once you’ve done this exercise, you may well discover that choosing to become clear of debt (or whatever your aim is) is not quite as terrifying as you thought.
 
In fact you could even decide to put the plan into operation.

Whether you do or you don’t … it’s your choice!
 

Don't just catch up -- get ahead!

[This article was originally written by me several years ago. It shows one of the alternative ideas I had before developing fully the methods in Do It Tomorrow. You may still find the ideas in it useful!]

Here’s a simple but powerful method to get almost instantly ahead of all your work and stay there.

For this you will need one bit of equipment — a page-a-day diary. Diaries for 2007 are being sold off cheap at the moment so this is an excellent time to begin.

Once you have obtained your page-a-day diary, follow these steps:

1. Write a list of every single thing you have to do. Spend some time on this. What would you have to do in order to be completely up to date with every area of your life? Include personal things as well as work. Get it all down on paper.
2. Break this list down as far as possible into individual actions. For example don’t just write “Publicise my business”. Write down all the actions that you would need to take in order to publicise your business. The smaller and more precise you can make each item the better.
3. You should have quite an impressive list by now! The next step is to decide how long you are going to give yourself to complete each action. The way to look at it is to ask yourself “What is the maximum amount of time I could take to do this before it either became pointless or had some serious adverse result?” If it’s something for which there is no such deadline then ask yourself “How long shall I give it before I admit that I have no real intention of doing it?” Write next to each item the number of days, weeks or months you are going to give yourself to complete it.
4. Now transfer the list into your diary. First write all the items you have decided must be done today under today’s date; then then those you have given yourself one day to complete under tomorrow’s date; and so on.
5. If you have done this properly you should only have items under today’s date which absolutely have to be done today. These should be relatively few. Do them. You are now up to date! You have done every single thing that has to be done today and you have scheduled every other thing you have to do.
6. Now you can start working forward. Once you’ve completed one day, go on to the next day. See how many days you can get ahead. Suddenly you are not only up to date with your work but several days ahead. Imagine the thrill of being able to say “I’m a week ahead with my work!”
7. As new items appear, decide how many days you are going to give yourself to complete them and add them to the appropriate diary page.

A couple of very important rules:

Rule One: You can do the items for a particular day in any order you like, but you must clear all the items that day before you can go on to the next day.

Rule Two: There is no carrying forward of incompleted items. If you have not completed an item in the time you allocated to it, you must accept that you are never going to do it (or certainly not for the time being) and let it lapse.

And a couple of tips:

Tip One: Don’t be tempted to make the time you give yourself to complete something too short. If you’re already taking up to seven days to reply to a letter, don’t suddenly decide you are going to reply to all your letters within 24 hours.

Tip Two: Depending on how you like to organise your life, you may want to have a separate diary for work and personal items. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a separate book of course — you can just divide each page horizontally or vertically in two.

Fooling Yourself the Positive Way!

I’ve written in the past that one of the best ways to get yourself moving on something you are resisting is to use the magic phrase “I’m not really going to …. now, but I’ll just….”. For example if you are putting of writing a report, then say to yourself “I’m not really going to write the report now, but I’ll just get the file out.”

What the phrase accomplishes is to get you over the first step. Once you’ve done that your mind seems to lose much of its resistance and you start to gain momentum. In fact what often happens is that you seem to get into an almost automatic frame of mind in which you hardly notice that you are doing the task.

I remember last summer I was sitting in my garden one Sunday afternoon after lunch enjoying the sunshine, when I became aware that I really ought to be mowing the grass. Naturally that was the last thing I wanted to do, so I said to myself “I’m not really going to mow the grass now, but I’ll just get the power cable out”. The next thing I knew was that the grass was mown. It was almost as if someone else had done it. But there wasn’t anyone else around, so I knew it must have been me!

If you use this phrase a lot, an interesting thing starts to happen. You frequently find that you by the time you have finished the phrase, you already well into the task. For example, by the time you have said “I’m not really going to write this report now, but …” you will have started to write the report!

So just saying the first half of the phrase gets us moving. We don’t even have to specify what the first step is.

What is happening here? Why should saying we’re not going to do something be the trigger phrase that gets us to do it?

In some way one part of our mind seems to be able to fool another. One part is perfectly aware that we intend to write the report, at the same time that another part is blindly believing the lie that we’re not really going to do it.

Notice the difference between saying “I’m not going write that report now” and “I’m not really going to write that report now, but …” In the first one, we mean it!

What happens if we start to use this technique on longer-term things? “I’m not really going to lose 10 lbs, but …” or “I’m not really going to sail around the world, but …”.

Have fun finding out!

Time to think again?

How long-lasting are the decisions that we make? When I look at my life today, I realise that nearly everything in it is still affected by decisions that I either made or failed to make five, ten or even twenty years ago. I was a very different person years ago and my priorities and outlook on life were very different: but decisions I made then are still the basis of many of my present circumstances — my family, the type of work I do, where I live, the state of my health and so on. I’m quite sure that I would have no intention these days of entrusting my future wellbeing into the hands of an inexperienced and irresponsible teenager. Yet even in middle life I’m still living with the fallout from some of the decisions about my life made by just such a teenager — me!

Research has suggested that that the biggest factor in the physical wellbeing of people in their seventies may be the amount of exercise they took when they were in their sixties. And the biggest factor in how well you and I will be living in ten years time is likely to be the decisions we are taking today. But we are often so bogged down in the demands of the present moment that we don’t step back and consider what is going to be really important to us in ten years time. So the decisions we make are taken for short term reasons — but they have long term effects.

One of my key roles as a life coach was to help my clients identify decisions that they wwould look back on with satisfaction in later years. And paradoxically one of the most far-reaching decisions many of us could make is to stop putting up with things that detract from our lives now.

Try this exercise:

Imagine yourself in five years time feeling really good about the way your life has turned out. Write down in as much detail as you can what your life is like — use the present tense.

Now ask yourself: What decisions did I make back in 2007 that got me where I am today?

If you like, you can show your commitment to those decisions by writing them in the Comments.

Eating for a Long Life

There’s an interesting snippet in James LeFanu’s “Doctor’s Diary” in the Daily Telegraph today in which he says:

There should be much to learn from our most senior citizens about the sort of healthy diet that might promote longevity

He then gives some examples of this healthy diet.

Florrie Baldwin, current oldest Briton, aged 110: a fried-egg bap for breakfast every day.

Ada Mason, previous oldest Britain, aged 111: bread and dripping with lots of salt.

Charlotte Hughes, oldest-ever Briton, aged 115: cooked breakfast of bacon and eggs (and brandy).

Back to the Diet!

My week of resting from my diet is now over, so this morning I weighed myself to see what the damage has been from a week of eating what I like when I like. Considering that I’d taken full advantage of having no rules in place, I was glad to find that I’d only put on one pound. This means that my new target weight for the day is three pounds more than it would have been if I hadn’t taken the break.This isn’t too bad at all, as it could easily have been a lot worse.

In case you can’t work out how I arrived at the figure of three pounds, I’d better spell it out. It is made up as follows:

I was one pound over the day’s target when I stopped

The target weight would have dropped one pound over the week if I had stayed on the diet.

I have put on one pound.

Total three pounds. Since my aim is to lose one pound a week, in time terms I have slipped three weeks.

It’ll be interesting to see whether this adjustment will now make the diet easier to keep to. My wife did the same a few weeks back (with exactly the same result of three pounds/weeks), and she has had no problem since.

Full details of the diet I am following can be found here.

The Random Element - How to get out of the rut!

One of the things which often holds us back from making decisions is the belief that we must make the “right” decision. Sometimes people will put off making necessary decisions for years, possibly even for a lifetime, because they are afraid that they might be making the “wrong” decision. But the truth is that there is are no right and no wrong decisions, only decisions with different consequences. One way to help free up our minds’ decision making processes is to make some decisions entirely at random.

Some time ago I was coming back from giving a morning seminar in Stafford . I was driving on the motorway and, as I was in no particular hurry, I decided that I would forgo the delightful experience of having lunch in a motorway service station. Since I didn’t know the area, my normal reaction would have been to turn off the motorway and go searching for somewhere nice to eat. But for some reason this time I decided to break out of my usual rut and select a place entirely at random. To do this, I quickly invented a set of rules. I would take the next turn off the motorway and then I would turn left at every road junction. I would stop at the very first place I came to which served food whatever the place was like. I would eat there and nowhere else.

So I turned off the motorway and drove for several miles down country lanes, turning left at every junction. At the very least, I thought, I’m seeing some beautiful countryside which I would never have been likely to visit any other way. I finally came to a village, which had a charming country pub, where I had an excellent meal and met some interesting people. If it hadn’t been for the rules I had set myself, I would never have found it.

The next day I was coming back from Bury St. Edmonds at the same time of day and decided to do exactly the same thing. This time I ended up in a rather less charming pub, which was full of loud people with BMWs. Even though the company wasn’t so entertaining, I still had a good meal and felt I had done something rather more interesting than stopping on the motorway itself.

They were two different eating experiences, neither of which I would have had if I had done the obvious thing and stopped at the motorway service area, Not only would I have missed the atmosphere of two very different pubs, but I would also have lost the sense of adventure which comes from having no idea what lies around the next corner.

Actually I quite often make decisions completely at random. Have you ever noticed how you tend to stick to the safe choice when you go to a restaurant? You order something because you’ve had it before, or because you know what it is, or because the person with you recommends it. While we were in Australia and New Zealand last year we ate all sorts of Asian cuisines, including Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Malaysian, Laotian, Vietnamese, Nepalese and probably a few more that I’ve forgotten. I quickly learned not to play safe, but to order random dishes just to see what they were like — even if I didn’t have the faintest idea what they were. I don’t think I even once regretted my choice, and it greatly widened my taste experiences.

Some of you may have read the cult 70s novel The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart. I read it when it first came out. The hero of the book takes random decision making to the extreme, but his motivation is expressed in one of the opening paragraphs of the book: “Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty land is seldom seen. At best we wander from one much-worn sandbar to the next, soon familiar with each grain of sand we see.” By taking decisions at the throw of a dice he found a sense of adventure in his life again.

So don’t get hung up on making the “right” decision. Make a few random decisions today, and enjoy the adventure into the unknown!

The Role of Restrictions

Most articles and books on creativity encourage us to “think out of the box” and get rid of all the restrictions on our thinking. The trouble with this advice is that it is almost entirely wrong. It is very difficult to be creative when “anything goes” and you have no limitations, because it is the limitations that actually encourage creativity.

Give your mind a focused problem and it will respond. If I ask you to come up with a revolutionary new idea for improving motor cars in general, the best you could probably come up with would be a few vague suggestions. Yet if I asked you to think of a way of improving the steering wheel in your own car, you could almost certainly come up with some very useful ideas. The more focused the problem, the easier it is to be creative with it.

A good example is rhyme and meter in poetry. Consider the following poem, one of perhaps the greatest collection of poems in the world, Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

No longer mourn for me when I am dead

Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell

Give warning to the world that I am fled

From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell:

Nay, if you read this line, remember not

The hand that writ it, for I love you so,

That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,

If thinking on me then should make you woe.

O! if, I say, you look upon this verse,

When I perhaps compounded am with clay,

Do not so much as my poor name rehearse;

But let your love even with my life decay;

Lest the wise world should look into your moan,

And mock you with me after I am gone.

In writing this poem, was Shakespeare hampered by the fact that he had chosen to use a very conventional format, in which not only are the metre and rhyming scheme fixed, but also to some extent the subject matter? No, not at all. He produced a great work of art by the very fact that he was exploring the limitations of the format. And not only did he do it once, he did it over a hundred and fifty times — each time producing a different effect!

What has all this got to do with us in our daily lives? Well, have a think about your life. Are you thinking and working on clearly focused objectives with clearly defined boundaries? Or is your life and work diffused over many poorly defined projects with no clear boundaries? Which is likely to produce the greater degree of creativity in your life?

If you have the feeling that you are getting nowhere or that you can’t keep your impetus going, the moral is narrow your life down. You will find paradoxically that you are able to able to exercise far more freedom within your narrow boundaries, than the deceptive “freedom” which has no focus, no boundaries and is ultimately unsatisfying because it is going nowhere.