ClaSs 4: tOnS oF iDeAS (26 Jun ‘09)

How to get a new good idea?

“getting tons of ideas”
They say there’re 2 types of people in the world. When trying to solve a problem, if you use the knowledge you’ve learned to get a solution you are considered a “satisfier”, but if you try to find out as many solutions as you can to get the best one for that problem, you’re an “optimizer”. The optimizers tend to have more new nice ideas as there can always be more than one way to solve a particular problem. Many of the great innovators have both good and awful ideas but they’re still praised for their good ones.

So, remember that “The best way to get a new idea is to find a lot of ideas” and these are some practices to get a lot of ideas.

Barometer Problem

1. Thinking beyond the frontiers of our fields may yield a better solution that no one ever think of. There’s a legend which can be a very good example of this approach called “the Barometer Problem” which can be read at http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/barometer.asp.

2. Pick a number of an idea quota and try to think of several ideas to meet that number. Thomas Edison set his quota that he’d invent a small innovation every 10 days and a big innovation every 6 months. As a result, he held the world’s record of inventing 1093 inventions for his entire life!

3. Think opposite. Sometimes finding solutions for the opposite things of what we concern may give us better ways. Who knows!

How to eat and drink correctly?

Today, many people are always in rush and when they have to eat and drink 3 times a day, they become used to eating and drinking quickly. But is eating fast a problem? The answer is “yes”. I found very interesting article about reasons why we should eat more slowly from http://longevity.about.com/od/lifelongnutrition/a/eat_slow.htm which i’ll summarize it here.

1. Taste
The more time it takes you to eat a meal, the more experience of the flavors, textures and smells of the food we’ll get. Our food will become more interesting and we’ll feel more fresh from our drink.

2. Lose Weight
There are studies that show “fullness” is a complex concept that combines the number of times we chew, the time we spend eating, the look of the food on the plate, as well as the actual amount of food we eat. So slow down can make us feel full with less food.

3. Choose Better Food
This is very interesting.
Most food factory are carefully designed by food engineers to make them taste great for the first 3 or so bites. As a result, we feel like to eat another cookie or potato chip after just a few chews. But if we chew thoroughly, like try chewing a potato chip 25 times times, it will become disgusting. On the other hand, natural foods stay interesting as we chew, for instance, fruits or vegetables start out with a burst of juice, but still stay interesting as we chew. So the more slowly we chew, the more we’ll prefer healthy food.

4. Improve Digestion
Chewing more gives our stomach more time to start working on the food and easier digestion.

5. Be More Social
As meals are a time when people spend time together, taking more time at a meal make us be able to talk with friends and family more and improve the relationships.

6. Improve mindfulness
This may be called eating meditation. Chewing slowly can result in having more mindfulness and awareness in more varied situation because it slows us down so that we can notice how our mind and body works.