Editor’s note: This is a guest post from bestselling author, Michael Michalko.
Michael’s super skill is creative thinking.
In fact, he organized a team of intelligence specialists to research, collect, and categorize all known inventive-thinking methods.
One of my favorite books by Michael is Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition), which is listed by 800-CEO-READ as one of the best business books of all time.
Without further ado, here’s Michael on, Dancing in the Rain …
To the right is a drawing. What does it look like to you?
If you said frog, you were right.
However, if you said horse, you were also right.
Can you see the horse? (Hint: Tilt your head to the right.)
We See Things as We Are
We see different things in the lines and shapes of the drawing depending on how we look at the drawing.
In a way, it is the same in the real world where we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
If you are a happy person, the world is a joyful place.
If you are a sad person, the world is a place of despair.
Two Men: A Paralytic and a Man with a Terrible Lung Disease
A few years back, two men, a paralytic and a man with a terrible lung disease, were confined to a hospital room.
Each day, the medical staff would help the man with the lung disease sit up for an hour and, during that time, he would gaze out the window and describe what he saw to his paralyzed roommate whose bed was on the side of the room away from the window.
One Saw Birds, Clouds, and Children at Play
He’d describe children running and playing, a father walking with his child, a bluebird in a tree across the way, how the wind moved the clouds, how the rain washed the sidewalks and roads clean, and two little boys playing catch.
His descriptions gave the paralyzed man a sense of hope, a will to live.
The Other Saw a Wall
One day, the man with the lung disease died. The paralyzed man asked to be moved close to the window and, when the nurses obliged, asked them to help him sit up so he could see out. Again the nurses obliged, but all that could be seen from the window was a wall.
Shocked, the paralyzed man told the nurses about the wonderful things his former roommate had described and about how those descriptions had given him hope.
The World is Largely in Your Mind
The nurses were a little shook up by this and told the paralyzed man something he didn’t know about his roommate.
“He was blind,” they said.
The point is, the world is largely in your mind.
It’s how you think, how you dream, that determines how you see and perceive things. Life is not about waiting for storms to pass, it’s about learning how to dance in the rain.
