Lesson: Creatively Entrepreneurial with Carl Nordgren

Step #9 Practice: Get out of your head

We need to get out of our minds. For years, I’ve told students about how the status quo out in the world is a big challenge for your entrepreneurial effort. This research tells us that it's really our own status quo, our own behavior, our common way that we always think about things that gets in the way of our entrepreneurial and our creative behavior. So it's a whole lot of research that shows the tests different ways to get out of your mind. One of them that my Duke students have so much fun with is the research that shows that yes, indeed, if you have a beer, you are going to be much more effective at a whole range of creative challenges than if you hadn't had that beer. And of course they have a lot of fun with that one.

Another one is that if you are a University of Indiana student and you are asked to solve a challenge there in Indiana, the creative, the originality, the amount of solutions that you come up with is much less than if you are trying to solve that same problem in India. You need to create that distance to get a little bit out of your comfort; it causes you to become more creative.

So anything that we can do to get out of your common way of thinking. Are you somebody that always brings your problems into your home office? Well, maybe this morning you should take your problem to a walk out in the woods which oh, by the way, has an additional benefit because there is research that now shows that what the lake country poets knew instinctively in fact is true, and that is when you reach your natural stride, when you begin to go for a walk and you reach your natural stride, your brain just comes alive in a way that it doesn't otherwise. Both hemispheres awaken and begin to communicate with each other. So there is another way to prop your thinking is to go out and take a nice, long walk.