Creative Blogging

AuthorHouse

Contents

Forward.....................................................................................1I. Introduction.............................................................................7II. Creative Collective Consciousness.......................................................17b. How to Use Your Intuition to Find Answers to Your Questions..............................24c. How to Use Your Imagination to Create What You Want......................................27d. How to Use Your Intuition and Your Imagination to Find the Right Job.....................35e. Techniques for Improving Your Personal Life and Business.................................41III. Using the Blog in Creative Processes...................................................45a. Combining the Blog with Collaborative Teams..............................................45b. Solving Business Problems with Collaborative Teams.......................................51IV. Anticipating Change (Cycles)............................................................56a. Cycles of change.........................................................................56b. Growth versus Efficiency Cycles..........................................................59c. Personal Financial Cycles................................................................63d. Stock Market Cycles......................................................................64e. Debt Cycles..............................................................................65V. Keeping It Simple........................................................................68a. Two-Edged Sword of Technology............................................................68b. Simplify, Simplify, Simplify ............................................................70c. A Simple Technique to Time the Stock Market..............................................72d. Selecting Your Collaborative Team........................................................77e. How to Function in a Collaborative Team..................................................82VI. Conclusion..............................................................................88Works Consulted.............................................................................93How to use this book........................................................................95About the Author............................................................................97Notes.......................................................................................98

Chapter One

There is a story of an immigrant to America who was very successful. He was asked the secret to his success. He said that his father told him before he came to America to keep asking the same question and he would be successful at whatever he tried. This question was "How you do dat?" Many books and education systems focus on what to do, not how to do it. This book focuses on "how you do dat." It focuses on how to use the blog in a creative way, how to use your imagination and intuition, how to work in a collaborative group, how to find the right job, and how to create your own destiny. If you want to improve your business or personal life, please read on. I will show you "how you do dat."

Many new ideas are combinations of ideas that already exist. This book discusses the use of blogging combined with creative techniques to improve your personal life or business. The creative techniques discussed in this book were used by me, during a lifetime spent owning and working for large and small businesses as an entrepreneur, a business owner, an employee, and a consultant.

There is a common thread that runs through all creative techniques that can be used to master any situation. My grandmother taught me how to find this common thread and apply it to my life. These creative techniques are ageless. To demonstrate this point, I am including in the "Works Consulted" section of this book a list of some of my grandmother's favorite authors who published works in the last half of the 1800's and the first half of the 1900's. She was a great fan of authors such as Frank C. Haddock, Wallace D. Wattles, Prentice Mulford and Albert Einstein. They all knew how to use their intuition to find answers to their questions.

I have experienced business start-ups, a catastrophic business failure, managing a process improvement team in a large public agency, managing a value engineering program that saved $50 million, and participating in or leading value engineering, cost reduction, and process improvement teams. I am also an engineer, a stock and commodity trader, a corn and soybean farmer, and a musician. Through all of these experiences, I have found that Albert Einstein's philosophy works best when applied to creative processes and problem solving. I am using his quotes along with some others to illustrate points in this book.

We cannot solve the significant problems we face at the same level of thinking at which we were when we created the problem. -Albert Einstein

In other words, it is necessary for us to change our thinking and to try different approaches or we will never get different results. Einstein put it yet another way:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

My intent with this book is to give you some different ideas and approaches that may apply to your specific situations. Some of these ideas might seem a little strange at first, but hear me out and try them. You will then experience their value. Most of the valuable things in life are experiential. What at first may seem like a case of runaway imagination starts to make sense after you have experienced what I'm talking about and can then apply that knowledge to your reality. For example, if you try to tell a young child that she will get burned if she touches a hot stove, she won't have a complete idea of what you are talking about. Once she actually experiences touching a hot stove, she truly understands what it means to get burned. Much of learning what to do is by first experiencing what not to do. Experience has changed her perspective about hot stoves and made her wiser.

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a hot stove a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.-Albert Einstein

Once a cat sits on a hot stove, it won't sit on a cold stove either. -Samuel Clemens

Looking back at the life choices we have all made, it is easy to see that most of us have a tendency to pick the hardest way of doing things. We somehow have to touch that hot stove, when everyone tells us we will get burned, in order for it to become part of our reality. Experience is then our teacher and not someone else's words or books. The important thing for us to know is that mistakes are only mistakes if we make them a second time; they are just learning experiences. What we really need to do is take responsibility for our own actions, and if we find that something is not working for us, we need to do something different rather than continuing the same action. This book will show you ways to do things differently in order to master your business, your life, and create your own destiny.

My aim is to open you up to a whole new world of ideas on how to manage and experience your business, your life, and your job. I want to teach you how to think more effectively. This book will focus on how to use the blog in a creative way and how to use the subconscious mind that is in all of us to create your own destiny. In addition, I will teach you how to use these creative techniques in any situation, including stock and commodity trading and even finding the right job.

Our universities are good at teaching students facts and are moving toward teaching students how to think.

The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think of something that cannot be learned from textbooks. -Albert Einstein

Indeed, educators are beginning to understand the need to focus more on thinking, and to incorporate learning from experience into their curriculums. This is a good sign, because, as Einstein said:

The only source of knowledge is experience.

Application of knowledge or experience is wisdom, and that is what we need to be successful in our businesses or lives. I have worked with university graduates that have years of education. Some of these highly educated people didn't have the slightest idea how to apply that education. It would be like going into battle with three automatic weapons strapped on your back and not knowing how to use them. This book focuses on personal and business techniques that are part of the wisdom (or application of knowledge) that is necessary to be successful in our fast-moving electronic age. Some of the main topics include

1. Tapping the collective, creative consciousness that's already there inside yourself or your organization; 2. Using creative techniques to improve your personal life or your business; 3. Using the blog in combination with creative processes and techniques; 4. Using different approaches to problem solving in your business or personal life; 5. Using intuition and imagination in any endeavor, including finding the right job; 6. Re-envisioning your approach to natural business cycles, including timing the stock market as a leading indicator of change; 7. Embracing simplicity and intuition in your approach to technology and hiring practices; and using simplicity in any situation, including timing the stock market.

This book will show those wonderfully educated individuals, with these three automatic weapons strapped to their backs, how to use them in the battle of business and life.

If we look at what has been written about Albert Einstein, we will find that most writers tell us their interpretation of what he thought rather than how he thought. This book does the opposite; it focuses on how to think or "how you do dat."

Learning how to think as opposed to being told what to think is the starting point to getting these three weapons going. We are more often taught what to think by our parents, churches and religious affiliations, schools and universities, news media, and many others. We rarely spend much time learning how to think. What many people consider thinking is just parroting some programming that someone else has put into their heads. This so-called thinking is someone else's conclusion. We need to know the how and why of their conclusions before we accept them as our own.

When we are given the conclusions of some authority figure, we often accept them as the truth, even though we don't know how they were reached. When we accept their conclusions as the truth, we are only borrowing or absorbing their ideas. Borrowed ideas are incomplete and inevitably lead us down the wrong path when we try to apply them to different situations. For example, let us look at what the authority figures say about market timing in the stock and commodity markets. I have heard some financial advisors, university professors, and even Warren Buffet state that investors cannot time the stock market and should only use buy-and-hold (hope) techniques. Perhaps the reason they believe and teach that no one can time the stock market is because they don't know "how you do dat." They believe that if market timing is not part of their reality, then no one else can "do dat" either. Sometimes they even collect statistics to back up the erroneous beliefs of their logical, rational minds. What we believe is our reality. Actuality is what is. Will Rogers once said, "It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble. It's what we know that ain't so." I have used market-timing techniques that follow trends in my stock- and commodity-trading activities for a half century. Market-timing techniques have given me peace of mind and generated enough cash for me to own farms, to own businesses, and to do things that would have been difficult to do on the salary of an engineer. Market timing is part of my belief system and reality because I have experienced "how you do dat." We cannot get anyplace in life without first thinking about how to get there. My hope is that this book will help you to be open to experience new realities when you stop depending on others to tell you what to think. Learning how to think for yourself will bring you peace of mind and is a necessary step to becoming self-reliant. This will enable you to navigate through any circumstance within which you find yourself.

As long as we are dependent on someone else to borrow his or her ideas or to tell us what to think, we become a slave to that person. I want to help set you free from that kind of slavery with the techniques that I will be presenting in this book. I want you to start using and experiencing these techniques. This will demonstrate to you that there is an enormous amount of freedom, joy, and independence that comes from creative thinking and thinking for yourself.

As previously stated, it takes effort to challenge the status quo and find the path used to get to any conclusion and its origin. There is a story of a young wife who always cut off part of a roast and threw it in the garbage before cooking it. Her husband intuitively knew something wasn't right about this and asked her why she did that. She said that she learned it from her mother. When the husband saw the mother, he asked her why she always cut part of the roast off and threw it away. She said it was because her roasting pan was too small! Understanding the path of events and circumstances will help define the how of the conclusion: the real reason why the mother cut off the end of the roast. The choice of paths helps define the why of the conclusion: the small roasting pan. Identifying wasteful techniques that have been inadvertently passed down to us is one of the first steps to improve ourselves or any process. Focusing on the how and why of any conclusion will give us food for thought that can be used with intuition to determine whether the conclusion we are told to believe is correct. Intuition along with thinking is then the application of knowledge.

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. -Albert Einstein

Getting a handle on Einstein's notion of intuition as a sacred gift along with the rational mind as a servant is necessary to create or improve anything in business or in life. Honoring and depending on the logical, rational mind or servant while forgetting the sacred gift of intuition is what most of us have been taught to do. This has led to many unsatisfactory results in our businesses and personal lives. Depending first on the intuitive mind or sacred gift, while using the rational mind as the servant, will help us find the right job, the right people, the right business, the right products, the right markets, and the right balance. This sacred gift of intuition and thinking will also help us understand the big picture, understand risk, anticipate change, be in the right place at the right time, and master ourselves and our businesses.

It is better for people to be like the beasts ... they should be more intuitive; they should not be too conscious of what they are doing while they are doing it. -Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was content to spend an evening with just a pencil and paper and not with books. His logical, rational mind (the servant) was not directly involved in his jotting down the intuitive flashes that popped into his mind. In other words, he had learned how to put his conscious rational mind (the servant) out of the way of that still small intuitive voice (the sacred gift). Einstein looked, heard, and witnessed facts with his logical, rational mind and saw, listened, and comprehended with his intuitive mind. I address techniques in this book on how to use your intuition and thinking in your personal, professional, and business life. If you feel trapped in the same old personal or business issues and need a way out, this book is for you. Let's get started!

Chapter Two

a. What Is the Collective Consciousness?

Collective consciousness can be easily exemplified with the well-publicized story of the hundredth monkey theory. This story demonstrates how the collective consciousness can be used to implement change. The story goes that there was an experiment that involved putting monkeys on two uninhabited islands with no food but potatoes. These islands were far enough apart so that it was impossible for monkeys from one island to get to the other. On one island, the monkeys were taught how to wash their potatoes before they ate them. After the hundredth monkey was taught how to wash his or her potatoes before eating, all the monkeys on the island began washing their potatoes. At the same time, all the monkeys on the island that had never been taught how to wash their potatoes also began washing them.

This same principle has been demonstrated in quantum physics. Fred Allan Wolf, PhD, the popular quantum physicist, says, "I'm talking about global consciousness. I'm talking about the fact that what one being does in some way affects everybody on the whole planet. It's not just separate beings all going their own ways. We are interconnected in ways that are very subtle and not easy to appreciate."

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest-a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. -Albert Einstein

Thoughts from the collective consciousness can also be illustrated by inventions and new discoveries that take place in different countries at the same time and from religions in different parts of the world that have the same stories. Even Buddha was supposedly born of a virgin, and every culture has its wicked witch story. Other thoughts from a collective consciousness might be those that we get from an athletic event, a religious or political rally, the Christmas spirit, and yes, even from any creative collaborative group.

The important point to understand is that our conscious objective minds are not aware that our subconscious minds are all somehow connected like wireless phones. There is a critical mass in change that can happen when a certain number of people change. The change then occurs in everybody. This can work both positively and negatively. It is important for us to focus on positive change and to stop negative change in its tracks. When we began to enhance the creative ability in a small group of people in our organizations, there will come a time when all employees in the organizations will become more creative. This can also be demonstrated by the law of resonance that was discovered by a Dutch scientist who added clocks with pendulums swinging at different beats to the same room as other clocks with pendulums. He noticed that after a short period of time, all the pendulums swung to the same tempo or beat.

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Excerpted from Creative Bloggingby Paul William Johnson Copyright © 2009 by Paul William Johnson. Excerpted by permission.
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