Page 97 - THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LOBOTOMY Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking

88 ASK THE QUESTION EARLY

TICK. TICK. TICK. TICK. TICK. TICK.

The great irony is that when you ask the question early you don’t have
to work on it. Your subconscious mind will work on the problem. Your
subconscious mind is working at levels you have no awareness of. That
and your superconscious mind are tapping into all that’s around you.
At a conscious rate we can process only 120 to 130 bits of data every
second, but on a subconscious or superconscious level we can process
millions of bits of data. For example, perhaps a bird flies by and trig-
gers a thought that can be the solution to a problem. If you haven’t
asked the question, you don’t know that the bird is the inspiration for
the solution to your problem. You can become inspired only if you
know what the problem is.
You already do this on your best days. Don’t you get ideas out of
nowhere? Seemingly out of nowhere, that is. When you’re driving in
the car or exercising or waking in the morning, you get ideas “out of
the blue” quite often. But, wait a minute, you can’t find a solution to a
problem you’re unaware of. You asked the question early, whether you
did it consciously or not. And if you didn’t do it consciously and you’re
just relying on happenstance, well, you’re lucky you asked the question
early. If you do it consciously, if you take this thinking tool seriously
and integrate this practice into your work style and spend 20 minutes
with the problem a week ahead of time (if you have the luxury), or just
spend five minutes a day ahead for that matter, you heighten your odds
of having better ideas.
This is a time management thing. You have all the time in the world
to do your job, right?
Wrong.
Anybody who’s been in business for a number of years knows that
you have less time today than you had two years ago. (Do you remem-
ber the old days of the twentieth century? Remember how slow the
pace was then?) Two years from now you’ll have even less time than
today. The world is spinning faster and faster. We have less and less
time. This creative thinking tool—Ask the Question Early—is a way to
manage your time, to get more out of your thinking. When you ask the
question early, consciously, you give yourself many more opportunities
to be inspired, many more opportunities to have that flash of brilliance
that so often happens when you’re looking to solve a problem (or often
when you’re not looking). And, as with so many of the Do-It-Yourself
Lobotomy tools we’ll cover in this book, it’s easy to do, it doesn’t cost a
penny, and it will make you a better thinker.