026: Structures for Creativity and Problem-Solving with Tim Hurson

Pete Mockaitis
Tim, thanks so much for appearing here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Tim Hurson
Nice to be here Pete. Thank you for asking.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Certainly. You’ve got a fun bio, but the thing that really grabbed my attention more than the others was that you started this organization, Facilitators Without Borders. That sounds fascinating. Can you tell us a little bit of … What’s the work that they do?

Tim Hurson
Yeah. You know, it’s really interesting. One of the things that I’ve learned about the way people think, the way people work together is that often people feel that they can, and everybody does it all the time. How many meetings do we have in our lives? In the millions.

Very rarely, are they actually facilitated meetings? Sometimes there’s a boss in that meeting, but there’s often meetings that people just think that this is something that they know how to do because … What could be more natural?

Yet, what I’ve discovered in my professional career is that it makes a huge difference if you can have a facilitator with a certain skillset and a certain attitude set that allows that meeting to function more effectively.

What we did is we took the work that we had been doing for corporations and for institutions and sometimes for governments and started applying that to organizations that didn’t have a lot of money. Facilitators Without Borders literally supplies these people with these particular types of skills to groups that otherwise couldn’t afford them. Sometimes it’s NGOs of various kinds. Sometimes it could be just community groups. Sometimes it’s a group of a immigrants who are struggling to try to make a place for themselves in an urban setting for example.

How do you think about these things? How do you really really begin to solve problems?

One of the things that I’ve learned is there are two kinds of facilitators. There’s one kind of facilitator who at the end of the meeting, let’s say it’s a business meeting, people walk out of the meeting and they say, “Whoa! That was a great facilitator. That was really amazing.” Don’t want to be that kind of facilitator.

Pete Mockaitis
I know where you’re going with this. Where do you want to land?

Tim Hurson
I want the people to say why were we great. We were fabulous. Then there was some guy in the corner there. That’s a good facilitators, because a facilitator isn’t about … It’s not about you. It’s about them.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Not the Tim’s show.

Tim Hurson
No. No way. That’s a little bit about Facilitators Without Borders. We’re going for about 10 years now.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. I’m glad to hear that that resource is available to organizations in need of that. One more thing, maybe kickoff the content conversation. I’d love to hear your take on … You believe the phrase out of the box thinking should be put back in the box and buried in a deep hole. Tell us about that.

Tim Hurson
You know what happens with any fad or as soon as things get popular, people start repeating these phrases over and over and over. It is how it is. Right? Over and over again, and they lose their meaning completely. People talk about the inside of the box and outside of the box. They’re just making noises. They’re not talking about anything at all.

I think that once a phrase gets drained of meaning like that and I think it does, it’s the kind of thing that you spout at employee meetings, or corporate meetings, or board rooms, and you sound like you’re talking about creativity or you’re talking about innovation. You’re not. You’re just feeling the air. You’re feeling the space.

That’s one reason, but there’s another reason too, and that is; can you imagine any other serious activity where you would say, “Let’s take morality or ethics.” Would you say that you have to go somewhere else, as in out of the box, to be ethical? To think ethically? To think, let’s say, customer service? No. You would want your employees to think ethically, be ethically, have good customer service all the time. Not just inside or outside of a particular box. It’s the same with productive or creative thinking. There’s no place for it. It’s everywhere. It’s part of your life.

I think that there’s this notion that you go to a creative room, or you go to a creative seminar, or you go to a creative session, and that’s where you should do that work. I think it’s nonsense. We should do it at home. We should do it at work. We should do it while we’re driving, because it’s part of who we are as human beings.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that. That’s rock solid. When it comes to how, we do that. You’ve got your productive thinking model and it sounds like there is a whole lot of years of research and experience underlying it in terms of, you said, 50 years with the Creative Education Foundation, 30 years at NASA, 5 years of field testing. Can you tell us a little bit of that back story, because it sounds like there is a towering amount of, I guess, productive thinking going into the productive thinking model?

Tim Hurson
There is, but I also want to … I’d like to take a step back. There are tons of models out there. People have heard of design thinking. People have heard of productive thinking. People have heard of creative problem solving. There’s something called synectics. People may know Dr. Edward de Bono and his six hats methodology, and in fact he has several.

There’s a world of method out there, and one of the most common and highly thought of is the so called scientific method, where you attempt to disprove a statement.

I really don’t think it’s a function of which method you use. I think the issue really is that in order to think productively, in order to think creatively, there’s a structure that is important.

It doesn’t mean that any older structure. I’m not going that far. If you use the most basic of kinds of structures like, “What’s the problem?” “What I do think is causing the problem?” “What do I think might be some possible barriers to solving that problem?” “What do I think I might do to overcome those barriers?” Even though that’s just … Literally. I’m just counting on my fingers and off the cuff kind of process.

If you follow that little unscientific process, you would think better about your problem than if you just daydreamed, or settlers sat there, or just took stabs in the dark.

It’s really not about any particular structure. So much as it is about structure itself. There’s huge value in structure. It’s not a whole lot different from the kinds of structures that we have in athletics.

In what was a 420 something or whatever, a young man by the name of Pheidippides ran from Marathon to Athens to report the victory of the Athenians over the Phoenicians, and he drops dead. That’s why we have the Marathon, the name Marathon.

Isn’t it interesting that today you’ve got, literally, almost a million people a year I think is the last thing that I read, running marathons and they’re not young strapping people. A lot of them are my age and they don’t drop dead.

One of the reasons they don’t drop dead is that we’ve developed structures around how to run marathons. Anybody who’s listening to the podcast and maybe you Pete, I don’t know. If you practice for a marathon, there is a way, there is a structure. You can do a certain amount of uphill and then you do your sprints and then you do your endurance and then you might do some weight training and so on. There’s a way that you do this stuff.

As a result of developing this structure, we run marathons better as a race of beings. The same is true with thinking. If you can figure out a decent methodology and apply that structure to your thinking, you can do marathon thinking in the same way as you can do marathon marathons. It works with music. It works with performance arts. It works with writing. It works with anything. We are learning creatures. If we could learn how to do things in a productive, efficient manner and then apply that learning, we could do anything.

Pete Mockaitis
That really connects with me as well and why I’m in this business. As a child I would go to the library and I would read a lot of books about a topic. Maybe it’s chess. Sure enough, I was playing better chess, because I learned some things, some structure. I’ve read some books about photography, and I was taking better photos because I learned some structure elements.

It was quite exciting as a youngster to take away that lesson, “Oh! Learning and books make you better at things. I can learn how to do things and then I become better. That’s cool.”

Tim Hurson
Make you better. Yeah, exactly right.  Exactly.

The folks who are listening to your podcast, everyone who will have had this experience. This is like a tiny, tiny example of the power of simple simple structure.

Everybody has had the experience of being in a work environment, or maybe you’re at home or maybe you’re doing a school project. You could come up with … Maybe you’re working with a group, and you come up with the best answer to this burning problem that you’ve had and that you can possibly imagine. You try to apply the answer and nothing happens. It doesn’t change.

What I do is … And I call that the great answer, wrong question syndrome. The simple activity of just focusing first on the question and saying, “Did I really ask the right question here, or am I fooling myself?” Mailing the question so that once you’ve got that question clearly defined, you know what you’re after. Then you start thinking about the creative solution to whatever it is and you have a much higher chance of success.

Just the separation. This is one of the most simple things that anybody could do, is separating the notion of what is the question from what is a possible way out of my pain, whatever that happens to be, so that I can focus on and define the question. Get it right. So that then all the other work that I do actually has purpose. Actually has meaning, and actually has a fact.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. Could you maybe give us an example of where this often breaks down or does not happen?

Tim Hurson 
In work environments, people are frequently talking about how we’re going to be able to save money. How we’re going to increase the bottom line. Very very often, they will focus on the wrong things. Often, it’s the low hanging fruit.

For example, one of the ways to increase the bottom line is to fire all a bunch of people, because the notion is let’s cut cost. Cutting cost may not be the right answer. It could be the right answer, but it may not be the right answer. It could be completely the wrong answer. In fact, maybe the real answer is you can grow either way out of your financial difficulties.

The reverse is also true. Often, you have people in entrepreneurial kinds of situations who are absolutely convinced that the answer to their problems is raid growth. Often, you have particularly in an entrepreneurial situation where the cost of producing a good is actually greater than the cost you can recover from selling it. Growth is a real problem that point the right …

A lot of people in business, many people in business have experienced that thing. You might be answering the wrong question and actually digging the hole even deeper.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s a great principle there. A clear separation in terms of the question versus trying to rush to an answer. Rather, make sure you gain the right answers to the right questions.

What are some other key principles or steps to bear in mind with productive thinking?

Tim Hurson
Another one is something that I call the third third. Because it sounds kind of interesting people.

Pete Mockaitis
The trademark it gets.

Tim Hurson
Right. Gravitate. There’s some good studies that suggests that in any good ideation session. I like to use the word ideation session as suppose to brainstorming, because brainstorming has taken its lumps over the years. I call them ideation sessions.

An ideation session can be you by yourself. You with a small group of people, or a very large group of people working with one another. That in any good ideation session, the first third of the ideas, more or less, are usually not ideas at all. There’s stuff that we know from the past. There’s stuff that we’ve heard from the past. They’re just below the surface, literally, of our skulls, and they’re not original.

The second third, once you exhaust that first third are ideas which are a little bit different. They have some potential, but they’re still not terribly adventurous. They’re rooted in your experience, your reality and so on. It’s the third third of those ideation sessions where you’re Wile E. Coyote who’s run off the edge of the cliff and he’s treading water or treading air in the air. There’s nothing anchoring you. That’s where the vast majority of creative ideas actually come from.

The problem is that we rarely, in most business environments and organizational environments, get to the third third. I call it satisficing. We satisfice on those first third answers, because they take us out of our misery.

Let me be explicit here. There was a client I had some many many years ago who is Ohio and they were glass manufacturing companies. Tumbler style glasses. Very inexpensive glasses. The kind of things you get in restaurants. Greasy spoon restaurants.

They had a problem, and the problem was that they would have these things coming off conveyor belts and they’d have packers packing them into crates. They didn’t want to use styrofoam to protect the glasses so they use newspaper. The workers would grab a glass from the conveyor belt, wrap it up in paper and quickly stuff it in a little slot in a box and finally fill the whole box.

Every once in a while, they would have a problem because the workers would reach for a piece of paper, usually it was yesterday’s paper, and they’d see a headline. Often, a sports headline, and it would stop them just for a fraction of a second. As a result, the conveyor belt keeps going and they would have this catastrophe. A lot of people had seen that classic I Love Lucy thing with a chocolate factory.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m imagining …

Tim Hurson
Exactly. That’s what was happening to these people. Management gets together and they come up with a whole bunch of first third answers to this question, “Let’s fire them.” “Let’s put close circuit TV cameras on them.” “Let’s reward them.” None of those are original ideas and none of them are likely to work.

At one point in the session … And when we do these sessions with clients, we push them, we push them, we push and people get a little ticked off, because they say, “I’m giving you all my answers. I don’t want to think anymore.” But you push.

Some guy in the group there said, “I know. Let’s just poke their damn eyes out.” He was being facetious. He was being … He was fed up.

Think about that idea? That idea has buried in brilliance, because what happens when you poke people’s eyes out? You can’t do. Even in Ohio, that’s not allowed. What happens if you hire people with sight problems?

Pete Mockaitis
They can’t see. They cannot be distracted by an intriguing headline.

Tim Hurson
Absolutely. Here’s the other thing. There some side benefits that you never even thought of. A lot of people who have that issue are … They have tactile sensitivity, which is much greater than people who are sighted. You might have less general breakage as well.

Then of course, you’re making a good name for yourself in the community presumably. Maybe you can even get subsidies for hiring such people. This one crazy third third answer becomes actually a wonderful solution, but we don’t get there.

In most of our ideation sections, we satisfice on the let’s fire them or let’s, closer, “Oh, yeah. That will work.” and we stop thinking.

One of the things I like to say is that don’t let your conclusion be it just before you happen to stop thinking. Yeah, it’s a conclusion, but the real conclusion is the one that goes beyond where you stop thinking.

One of the secrets of creativity and the secrets of productivity is it’s so basic. It’s just do it. It’s actually go further than you think you can go. Again, think about sports. How does a great athlete become a great athlete? By doing more and going further than they think they can go.

It doesn’t have to be just the elite who does that. Anybody at whatever starting point. You know that you can play a better game of golf. You know that you can run better. Same thing. You know that you can think better. You don’t have to be a creative genius like Isaac Newton, or Einstein, or Da Vinci. Wherever you start, you can get better.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s great. This notion about pushing it and going after the third third. We did … We had a previous guest, Esteban Gast, and said the key thing to get more creative ideas is just more time associated with legitimating those ideas.

Largely, there tends to be a depth in the process as we’re having ideation session. Folks put some things out and then you said they get aggravated. They say, “I don’t have anymore. That’s all I’ve got.”

Tim Hurson
I think what it really about is if yourself in your problem. You got all the data and you don’t have an answer yet. You’ve got all the data, you’ve been looking at it left, right, up, down, whatever, which way and that’s just going away sometimes incubating.

One of the things to do is not to brute force it. To take a brute force approach to it, but sometimes to do quite subtle things like stopping and, literally, smell the coffee, smell the flowers.

Another one might be to change your mode of thinking. You’ve been approaching the problem from a verbal logical point of view, which in a business environment is pretty common. What about trying to approach it from a sensory point of view? What about taking pictures of things and looking at them and saying, “How does this picture relate to my problem?”

A lot of people will say, “Don’t be stupid. That picture doesn’t relate to my problem at all.” Look at it. How does it relate to your problem? It’s astonishing what happens when you do things like the most simple things. What would your problem look like if you drew it? What would your problem look like if you could smell it? Try to take a sensory approach. That can often work.

Then there’s a physical thing. You can’t change anybody’s mind, I think, unless you can help them change their physical position as well. What about just moving around? What about taking the chairs out of the room? Really? You want to sit down? Don’t. Just walk. Walk around. Switch seats.

One of the coolest things that, again, people in your listening audience could do is go home tonight and have a dinner with your family and just switch seats with everybody. That simple act of switching seats. You sit where your kid sits, or the husband and wife change their sits, because they’re going to see a different table. By seeing a different table, they’ll also get different mental activities and will make …

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fascinating, as you say that. I’m imagining my childhood home where fun memories of some family dinners and I just think, “That’s my seat.” What you’ve said, I’m just like, “What? I can’t even imagine I’m sitting at a different seat.” It would certainly spark a different kind of a mood, a vibe and conversation.

Tim Hurson
Yeah. The diversity thing too Pete. I just read this recently and so forgive me if this isn’t going to be 100% accurate, but it really resonates with me. I read a story about a guy who had done some research and he discovered … Not that it’s a huge discovery, but he discovered that people in England keep their ketchup, their open ketchup bottles in different places from people in North America. People in North America keep their open ketchup bottles in the refrigerator.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. They do.

Tim Hurson 
Right? That’s what I would do. Right? People in England put them in the cupboard, because ketchup doesn’t really go off as … That takes a long time.

Imagine now you are preparing … I don’t know. Hamburgers, hotdogs and some fries for your family.

Okay. You reach into the place that you store your ketchup and you discover ketchup … That bottle empty. If you’re looking in the refrigerator, the substitute things that you’re going to find for ketchup are very different than the substitute things you’re going to find for ketchup if you keep it in your cupboard.

You might go into the refrigerator and say, “Oh, no. Ketchup … Maybe I can use some mayo on this.” Because that’s in the refrigerator too, or some mustard or whatever.

In England, the ketchup is next to the malt vinegar. Might I use some malt vinegar on my french fries as supposed to ketchup on my french fries. Just because my habit … Because of the diversity of my culture is slightly different.

Now, you can take that same principle and you can put a mathematician and a painter and a psychologist and I don’t know what else in a room and let them all work on the same problem. They’re going to come up with very different approaches.

At first, those are going to be difficult to accept by the others in the group. If they can defer judgment long enough and really begin to explore these ideas, it could be that the painter comes up with a great solution to the mathematician’s problem.

That kind of diversity is another great way of increasing the number of ideas. Not necessarily because you’ve increased the time, but because you’ve changed the process.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. That’s fun. These are such great gems that the principles here separate the question and the answer. Go after the third third and some different ways to spark that in terms of different people and activities and incubating and movement.

What else do you got? Is there an initial principle or tip you’d like to include or write at these rosters?

Tim Hurson
Oh my gosh! There really are a lot of..One of them that I think is really … There’s two and one relates to the time things I’ll say and I’ll say it real fast, but then I’ll move on. We tend to conflate coming up with ideas and criticizing the ideas. You come up with an idea and before you’ve even finished articulating it, somebody will say, “Oh! We find that.” or you’ll say that.

Just a simple mnemonic which I use is called make lists, make choices. All you do is the first of your thinking is you just list things. You don’t talk about them. You don’t say, “This is a great idea.” You don’t go off on tangents. You say, “Here’s a possible solution. Here’s another one. Here’s another. Here’s another. Here’s another. Here’s another one. Here’s another one.” You don’t even talk about it. You just make the list.

Then you back and you revisit the list and now you start the very different kind of thinking, because there’s two different modes of thinking. One is a creative mode and then there’s critical mode. I now make choices. That critical mode is now applies not to a single idea, but to a whole range of ideas. It gives you more options.

People go into brainstorming sessions. I said I didn’t like to use that word and I just used it. People go into brainstorming sessions and they come out with having talked about, after an hour, one idea. Because it gets rolled around and jumbled around in that session. That’s not a brainstorm. That’s a brain drizzle. It’s like a leech. It’s nothing.

Just make lists, make choices is a really really useful way of separating those two kinds of thinking, the creative from the critical thinking.

The other thing that I was going to say was the way we evaluate. We often evaluate ideas, people, restaurants, movies, whatever, in a very binary way, good, bad, in, our, up, down. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could have a tool that allowed you to evaluate ideas in such a way that it wasn’t just pass-fail, but in the process of evaluating the idea, I actually improve the idea itself. I call that generative judgement, and there’s a whole bunch of tools that you can use to do it.

I like one that’s super simple. I call it GPS. It stands for good problematic and step-ups, spelled step-up. What it means is I take a look at the idea and I say, “What is good?” “What is great?” That’s the g about this idea, and I just make a list. Same process I talked a minute ago, which is make a list.

Then I go and I look at it and I say, “What’s problematic with the idea?” “Well, it will get us thrown in jail.” “It will make us bankrupt.” Whatever. I make a list of those.

Then you go to the S. The magic here, you say, “How can I take what’s good in the idea and step that up to be great?” “What can I change in the idea to make something that’s good in it be absolutely out of sight? Because I’m not satisfied with the good. I want it to be great.”

Same is true with the problem. What can I do to step-up the problem from a problem to a possible potential? All I have to do is that three step process. What’s good? What’s problematic, and how do I step-up the good to great and how do I step up the problem to possibility? Now you look at the idea and you say, “Wow! That is not the same idea that I went in with.” I might still reject it. It might still be a bad idea. It won’t work, but I have given this thing a real chance.

There’s generative judgement using … As I said, there’s a ton of tools. I happen to like GPS because it’s simple that allow you to evaluate ideas in a very different way. That’s a huge huge plus.

Pete Mockaitis
That phrase, I like that, generative judgment. It’s not just fun alliteration, but it’s like judging not in the sense of what am I going to cut, eliminate now. Rather, how can I take this and generate further from it.

Tim Hurson
Exactly. Exactly. Again, there’s always an analogy. The analogy here is how do we raise kids if we do it well? With generative judgment. We say, “Wow! Really good work.” “You need to work on that.” How are we going to make that really good better and how are we going to work on that? Same process. Same process.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. I feel like we could do this all day, but in the interest of time maybe I’ll just ask is there any other key piece that you want to make sure you get to share before we shift gears and talk about some of your favorite things?

Tim Hurson
There is. You talked about time earlier and I think it’s worth revisiting. Everybody wants a quick fix. Everybody wants the magic bullet, the magic potion. Not happening. It’s not happening. Creativity or productive thinking, whatever you want to call it, is hard work.

It doesn’t come from nothing. It isn’t half an hour to solve the biggest problem your organization has ever had. It really takes work. Unless you realize that it takes work. Unless you expect that it will take work, you will be disappointed, because you’ll have a brainstorming session. You’ll say, “Well, that was a waste of an hour.” It probably was. You’re right.

You really do have to apply it. It’s not … It comes back to the inside of the box and outside of the box quote too. If you think that creativity or productivity or productive thinking is just this place that you go when you’ve got a particular problem and then you’ll spend 15 minutes there or 20 minutes or even two hours there and then come back and everything will be fine, you’re in for a big disappointment. It’s about work.

One of my favorite quotes is from the artist Chuck Close. He says, “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and we do it.” You know that as an entrepreneur yourself. Forget inspiration. It’s great if it comes. Wonderful. It’s the slug that does it for you. It’s doing the work. Doing the work. Doing the work.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Thank you. Now, let’s shift gears a little bit and hear about some of your favorite discoveries along the way with your work in consulting and just living life. Could you start us off by sharing a favorite quote. Something that you’ve thought about or find yourself repeating again and again?

Tim Hurson
Admitting you’re wrong is just … Or that you were wrong is just like saying, “I’m smarter now than I was then.” The converse of course is that not admitting that your wrong. Like, I’m just as dumb now as I was then.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun.

Tim Hurson
How much of life have people missed? All of us I think to some extent, because we had to be right. We had to be right. We’ve thrown away relationships. We’ve thrown away opportunities. We’ve thrown away, maybe, love, because we had to be right. Who needs that?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s profound. Thank you.

How about also a favorite study or a piece of research you cite often?

Tim Hurson
There’s a guy by the name of Goran Ekvall. Thank you for asking, because one doesn’t think about these things. It’s an adventure to jump in to now.

Pete Mockaitis
My pleasure. Thank you for tackling it.

Tim Hurson
A guy by the name of Goran Ekvall. Ekvall is Swede I believe. He did a study in the, I believe it was the 60s, and he measured creativity. I can’t even tell you how. I’m not 100 on it. He measured creativity in very very young children. I think up to the age of four. He gets a result that something 95% of these kids are creative.

Then he takes the same cohort study. He takes the same cohort when they’re 10 years old and he finds out that 30 some odd percent are creative. Many goes to early teenage and he finds that 5% are creative and these numbers aren’t right there, but they’re notional, they’re directional.

Then he goes to adults, and there are two of them, 2% are creative. I love that study because, “What happened here? Did their brains disintegrate?” No. Something else happened. I think what it is that’s happened is that they’ve lost the ability to do some of the things that we’ve just been talking about. They’ve lost the ability to be wrong. They’ve lost the ability to maybe have wonder. I guess it isn’t a wonder or a great thing. I love know …

One of my favorite tools, and I know I’m jumping away from your question. I want to talk about this other tool. It’s called know wonder. It is the best tool. It’s the simplest tool. You take any issue, any problem, anything that’s bugging you and you make a little t-square diagram. That famous left side, right side thing.

On the left side you say, “What do I know about it?” and you list all the stuff.The right side, you say, “What do I wonder about it and I should know about it, but I don’t?”

Just by doing this, either by yourself or with a whole bunch of people, you suddenly start seeing this issue in a totally different way than you sought it first.

Super simple tool, but a great tool know, K-N-O-W, and wonder, W-O-N-D-E-R. It’s that thing, again, that we don’t do enough.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Know wonder. How about a favorite book? One of your favorites that you’ve enjoyed?

Tim Hurson
I love stuff like … I’ll tell you some stuff that I read recently that I really I’ve gone crazy with. There’s a guy by the name of China Mieville who’s a British writer. You look at him, he looks like a biker and he’s got holes all over his body. That guy is absolutely brilliant.

He’s written a book called … got quiet a few books. It’s science-fictiony stuff. This one is called The City & the City. If anyone has an opportunity to read this, it is just a mind-blowing book. The City & the City.

The story is, real brief, it’s about two cities which actually occupied the same space and but they’re different countries and different cities and they have to be careful of how they behave. It’s a crime mystery that occurs in this weird kind of … But once he explains it to you … I can’t do it in just two sentences.

Once he explains it to you in the book, you can be there. You could say, “Oh! I can see that one happen.” Because it does happen in many ways. We have so many separate realities that we live in in our normal lives. Great book. China Mieville. British writer.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, intriguing. Intriguing. How about a personal habit or practice of yours that you found helps your productive thinking personally?

Tim Hurson
I got to come back to the shower. Actually, no. I’m not being facetious there, because I do go into the shower and like many people, I guess what … I think what happens if your critique just turns off in the shower and you’re allowed to think all these things that you don’t allow yourself to think.

The other one is, and maybe the more useful one is this issue of application that we talked about before, and that is do the work.

I’m working on a book now, fiction book actually. It’s my first fiction book, and I’ve developed the habit of waking up in the morning and not doing anything before I start writing for a couple of hours just in notebooks. Then what I’ll do is I’ll later transcribe that material.

I’ve discovered, there’s this great great story, apocryphal story about the physicist Richard Fineman. It goes … One of his friends once asked him, “Clearly, you’re a genius Richard. How do you do it? What’s your secret?” He said, Richard Fineman says, “Well, first, I write down the problem, then I think very hard and then I write down the answer.”

It’s the same thing with the book that I’m working on. I’ll have a problem with a character or a situation. I don’t know where the story is going to go. I literally, on that piece of paper is, “What’s going to happen to J.D?” One of the characters.

Then I start writing the answer. It actually works. I skip the thinking very hard part. I literally. I just write the answer. Eventually, stuff happens. Stuff comes. It’s part of the discipline of doing it. That daily daily discipline. It’s amazing.

One of the other things that you talk about your personal learnings and experiences. We often so over estimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term. It’s just chipping away at it. You can make miracles.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a fan favorite item that you share? When you share it, people retweet it or they start taking notes vigorously, or in your book, there’s a lot of Kindle highlights. What are some of those quotable gems of your own origin?

Tim Hurson
One of the things that people really like is the thing about that I mentioned earlier about not admitting you’ve made mistakes.

The other one that people seem to relate to is what I call the path you know. The path you know is the safe path, but it also takes you to the place that you’ve already been. It’s the path you don’t know, that is the scary path, it’s the frightening path, but it takes you to those new places.

I think that that’s certainly … Yeah, that’s one of them. It’s one that resonates with me and people come back and talk about that with me.

I suppose another one is that I … We opened up our conversation with this issue of the box. Me, I say there is no box. There’s no box. Once you get rid of the idea that there’s a box, it’s actually quite liberating.

Pete Mockaitis
Fabulous. Tim, this has been so fun. Tell us, if folks want to learn more about you and want to find your or reach out to you, where should they go?

Tim Hurson
Good. Best place is timhurson.com. That’s my name, T-I-M H-U-R-S-O-N.com. There is an organization that I run, not for profit, called Mind Camp, that’s M-I-N-D C-A-M-P, that’s a .org after that. That’s a creativity retreat that I run every year. About 250 people from all over the world come and we do it as a not for profit, so it’s relatively inexpensive.

Those are the two best places. I’ve got a couple of books out. One is called Think Better. A lot of the stuff that we’ve talked about here. Another one is called Never Be Closing, and it’s about sales, and it’s about applying the principles of productive and creative thinking to an ethical sales process.

Soon, there’s going to be a book coming out called Praxis, which is about improving performance in any sphere. Again, using a lot of the principles that we’ve just talked about.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. Never Be Closing, very clever name. A, always; B, be; C, closing.

Tim Hurson
You got it.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s also a network, NBC. That’s fun. Any final parting words or challenge or call to action for those seeking to be more awesome at their jobs?

Tim Hurson
Yeah. It goes to this issue that I mentioned just now, Praxis. A lot of people talk about the North Star. The North Star, that one goal. Over the years, I’ve become disabused of the idea of a North Star. I think that we have multiple reasons for doing things and that it’s really useful to figure out what those multiple reasons are.

I do it because I want to make money. I do it because … Whatever it is. It’s not just one thing. There’s usually a three-tiered thing, and the three tiers are … One is status. Status is how much money do you have? How famous are you? It’s this big social goal that people have.

The second one is relationships. How do I function in terms of that smaller circle, the tighter relationships in my life? The people I work with, my family and so on. What do I want to do in terms of those things?

The third one is the intrinsic one. What is it that makes me … That turns me on? That just really … Just lights my fire? It’s usually a balance of those things.

It doesn’t mean … When I say a balance, I don’t mean it’s … I don’t mean they all have the same weight, but there is a dynamic in here. What really is more important to me?

Because one of the things that I found, whether it’s about solving problems or performing well in a business context or in an athletic contest, all of them. Again, this all comes full circle again Pete, because there’s so much work involved in any kind of a successful activity, because there’s so much failure involved in any kind of successful activity. There’s so much pain involved in it.

You got to have enough motivation to get through that stuff. The unbelievable amount of work. The unbelievable amount of frustration. The unbelievable amount of pain. Unless you know yourself well enough, you’re going to give up. You’re not going to be able to follow through.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. That’s a powerful final thought. Tim, this has been so much fun. Thanks for making this time and good luck in all your creative and productive thinking.

Tim Hurson
Thank you Pete, and let’s talk again because I’d like to turn the tables on you and ask you all these questions too.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d be happy to. Thanks.