Business Artist Digest Sept 22, 2023

In the movie For the Love of the Game, Kevin Costner plays a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers. At a crucial moment in the story, he’s on the mound facing down a batter. People in the crowd are telling insults, a nearby train blows its horn, and there are a million other distractions.

In that moment, he knows he has to focus on the most important thing at hand: pitching his best game. He says one of my favorite lines to himself:

Clear the mechanism.

He knows he’s got to step away from the thinking part of his brain and let his instincts take over. He’s got to perform, but his thinking is getting in the way.

Awareness of your own thinking is a powerful thing. Or as Christopher Lochhead says, “Thinking about thinking is the best kind of thinking.”

Business strategist Roger Martin, author of A New Way to Think and other insightful books, says that our thinking can be divided into reactive and reflective thinking.

Reactive thinking can be described as the opinions that come into your mind when listening to others. Reflective thinking, on the other hand, can be described as questioning why you have those thoughts at all.

It’s thinking about thinking.

When we’re in a flow state, we often say the goal is to move beyond thinking since it can impede creativity. Your thinking brain will look for patterns and answers.

By contrast, when you’re in a flow state, the goal is to actually get beyond thinking into the imaginative part of your brain that doesn’t rely on language or reasoning.

Like a jazz artist riffing a new melody, a rapper spitting new lines, an improv artist working a crowd, or an NFL quarterback making a split-second decision, you don’t have time to think. You just let creativity happen.

But in spite of the buzz and attention “flow state” gets these days, is it always appropriate? What’s the difference between thinking and instinct? Where does practice and preparation fit into the mix?

In music, you have to learn to play the scales. In sales, you have to learn how to handle objections and identify the root cause of someone’s “no.” In any field, you have to practice all kinds of different scenarios.

You can’t learn this from a book. You have to experience it for yourself so you can process information so fast that you can just perform.

Business Artists are prepared. We adapt our performance. We see challenges and rise to the occasion.

Whether it’s an artistic performance on stage or handling a sales situation–or a million other scenarios in the world of Business Artists–we can move from a state of over-thinking to a state of flow.

That’s where the magic happens.

- Adam

From the Blog

Is Your Creative Flow Blocked?

You've felt it before: that spark of an idea giving way to doubt, delays, and endless obstacles.

For all the talk you hear and read about ‘flow state’, the reality is that creative energy gets blocked far more often than not. The place to begin looking for obstacles is not 'out there' but 'in here.'

Humans have evolved to have the largest prefrontal cortex of any mammal on earth While this is beneficial for thinking, pattern recognition, language, and more, this need for logic often locks up our natural imagination.

READ MORE

Adam Recommends

Related to my thoughts in the first section of this week’s email, I’m excited to highlight a book that’s been essential to my understanding of flow: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

If you want to dive into this topic at a deeper level, I highly recommend you check it out! One of the highlights of Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow can be summarized by this simple graphic, which shows flow as related to challenges and abilities. I’ll explore the topic much more in my upcoming book, The Business Artist.

There is also great Big Thinkers like Steven Kotler I love to listen to in this space

Business Artist Spotlight

Earlier I mentioned the author and podcaster Christopher Lochhead ???????????? , one of my favorite thinkers - especially for startups. He’s also one of the co-founders of Category Pirates, a business think tank. They help business leaders become more successful by exploring category design, languaging, and science.

They also released a new book recently: The 22 Laws of Category Design Highly recommended if you want to learn how "Move The World From Where It Is To Somewhere Different"