Good morning. Welcome to the Increasing Impact Podcast. I'm Justin Sua, episode 1,9159. Today's excerpt

comes from the book, Finding the Next Steve Jobs by Nolan Bushnell and Gene Stone. They talk about a CEO who does this trick or this exercise to spark creativity, I would ask everyone to make a list of all

the ideas that had been presented at our meetings and then have them rank those ideas from good

to bad. I would then take the six items on the bottom of the list and say, let's suppose we were

restricted for the next few months to work on these six terrible projects.

How do we make them work?

This process reversed people's normal mental dynamic.

Instead of trying to figure out what's wrong with something, which triggers people's critical instincts.

Here, they had to figure out what was right with something,

which triggers people's creative instincts, close quotes. The reason I like this so much is because

it is very easy to bash an idea. It's very easy to throw something outside the window

because we don't think it's possible, or we don't think it's possible or it's not

something we don't think it's something we should do or even could do. But as we push against

our own beliefs and question our own assumptions, we don't fall to something called

cognitive fixedness, which is essentially thinking that there's only one way to do something. My invitation to you

and for myself is to take something and lean into something called creative constraints.

Creative constraints is simply knowing that constraints breed creativity. If you have an hour to do

something, what would you do if you only had 30 minutes to do something, what would you do if you only

had 30 minutes to do it? What would you do if only had 10 minutes to do it? Now initially you think,

well, that's impossible, but what if you, that's all you had and you had to make it work.

As you practice exercising with this stream of thought and using this thought experiment,

you start to get more creative and find better ideas and better ways and more effective and more efficient

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