Jump Start Your Brain: How Everyone at Every Age Can Be Smarter and More Productive

by Doug Hall, David Wecker (With)

Overview

Learn time-tested, research-proven practices that generate creativity and innovation, helping you and/or your organization get a leg-up on the competition.

Creativity is not random. There are reproducible tools and tactics that can help you think smarter and more creatively. Doug Hall and David Wecker work with executives, entrepreneurs, kids, teachers—and everyone who hungers for more wisdom, creativity, and personal growth—to invent ideas for solving problems 52 weeks a year using the Eureka! Way.

Jump Start Your Brain Version 2.0 is your guide to a counter-corporate culture approach to creativity, urging you to break rules with childlike abandonment—and have fun doing it. The methods are tried and tested to make your brain 500 percent more creative! Get your cranium flowing with new feats of imagination. This book is a hotbed of innovation, turning the art of creativity into a reliable, renewable science to help you at every age. The Eureka! Way pushes the fear out and puts the fun back into the game.

“[Doug Hall is] an eccentric entrepreneur who just might have what we’ve all been looking for—the happy secret to success.”
—Dateline NBC

“We’ve found Doug Hall’s methods to be different than most. They work.”
—Michele Wojtyna, Pepsi-Cola Company

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781578604050
Publisher:	Clerisy Press
Publication date:	02/01/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	36 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Doug Hall has been hailed as "America’s #1 Idea Man” by CIO Magazine, A&E Top 10 and Inc Magazine. Doug is the founder and CEO of the Eureka! Ranch, a corporate innovation and research think tank. He is a leading practitioner&researcher in the field of marketing innovation leadership and is the author of numerous books including two national bestsellers: Jump Start Your Marketing Brain (Emmis Books) — a BookSense pick — and Jump Start Your Business Brain. Doug lives with his family in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Contributor residences (city, state or country if outside the US or Canada): Cincinnati, OH

Read an Excerpt

Creativity starts with the willingness to look at the world through innocent eyes. It involves shaking ourselves from our prejudices and established thinking patterns. Copthorne MacDonald, an expert on the cultivation of wisdom, explains how innocence helps us discover new insights:

“We find ourselves looking at the same old data, but we now see it in a dramatically different way. We experience another valid and sometimes more significant way of understanding what is.”

Sadly, the world grinds away at our trust and our innocence. Experience teaches us to doubt, to scoff and roll our eyes. In no time at all, the world can turn a genuinely creative individual into a Real World Adult. At that point, there’s not much of the real you left—too often, just a job title on a business card, a nameplate on an office door, a number on a badge, a face in the crowd.

Think back. Remember when you were young and the world was a glittering place of limitless possibilities? Everywhere you looked, you found something new and different. Remember the magical feeling that you could do anything simply because nobody was telling you otherwise.

A child’s word is made of spirit and miracles. We sometimes think that children should follow us, listen to us, become like us. Follow a child closely for an hour. Not to teach or to discipline, but to learn, and to laugh.
– SARK, “A Creative Companion”

Or to put it another way:

“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”
– Aldous Huxley

The key word is “spirit.” The goal is not to remain a child for the rest of your life, but to retain that childlike spirit of wonder and a willingness to innocently believe in possibilities. As children we have a natural innocence. As we age we lose it. I believe that one of the greatest benefits of spending time with children and grandchildren is that they teach us the virtues of innocence—IF we are aware and open to the learning.

Three Quick Examples of Innocence

EXAMPLE NO. 1: TRUTH IS RELATIVE TO THE CUSTOMER’S VIEWPOINT
One day, I was reading Big Bird’s Color Game to my then three-year-old daughter, Tori. On one page, Big Bird was shown thinking of something orange that’s good to drink. “I bet you can’t guess what it is,” so said Big Bird in his word balloon.

On the next page, Tori had a choice of a half-dozen orange-colored items—a butterfly, a T-shirt, a jack-o-lantern, a toy boat, a tiger lily and a glass of orange juice.

Which one did you pick? Tori picked the tiger lily because of its long stem, which she took to be a straw. When you’re three years old, “good” equals “fun.” And it’s a lot more fun to drink through a straw than from a plain old glass. The tiger lily might not have been the answer Big Bird had in mind, but it was a valid response to the question.

Table of Contents

Why A "2.0" New Edition?     8
Introduction     13
Brain Training
Innocence     28
Adventurousness     38
We Hold These Truths To Be Self-evident     50
Ideas-The Good, the Bad and the Ugly     64
The Eureka! Formula for Creativity     82
Explore Stimuli     90
Leverage Diversity     108
Drive Out Fear     124
Welcome to the Ranch     144
Jump Starts
Top Ten Stimuli Jump Starts     162
Top Ten Industrial-strength Jump Starts     200
Top Ten Group Creativity Jump Starts     242
Go For It
Real World Survival Guide     280

Editorial Reviews

Sandwiched in between a ton of exclamation marks, big type, and silly clip art is Hall's rather elemental idea: to be creative, you need to stimulate your brain with external "things," ranging from dime-store toys to Sears & Roebuck-like catalogues. Included are a psychological rationale for his approach to creativity and 36 brain programs, the actual techniques used to undrain the brain. By using disguised case histories and national publicity as evidence, he and his coauthor sell us on the right way to train brains. Corporate types might prefer a tamer version, but his substance and his premise (that U.S. businesses are decidedly noninnovative) are on target.

Barbara Jacobs