Hard thinking

Dances with Wolves is a great movie, and the book by Michael Blake is even better. A cracking read.

My favourite line from the book is "Ten Bears shooed everyone from his lodge and sat by himself for more than an hour, thinking about what Kicking Bird had told him. It was hard thinking.” 

I love that idea…hard thinking. And if you want to call yourself an expert, you need to do some hard thinking along the way.

The problem is we’ve never actually been taught to think. So if you shoo everyone from your lodge to sit down and do some hard thinking, what do you actually do? What most do is to think into our delivery. Write an article or whitepaper, design a speech or a workshop.

My friend and partner Matt Church has created a process we can use to think more productively and more effectively. Matt would say this idea came through him rather than from him, so I can say it’s genius (not a word I use lightly) without puffing him up too much.

In the Thought Leaders community, we talk about it as our unfair competitive advantage.

I’m talking of course of the pink sheet process. It’s a way of getting your thinking out of your head and into a format that can then be used in multiple applications. How to think once and use often. A way of doing hard thinking.

We’ve captured it in a book, and you can get it for free (along with a bunch of other cool stuff) at the pink sheet process website.