Book Excerpt: Your “Search Engine” Brain

Our brains work a lot like a search engine. Keywords are everything. Enter good keywords and you’re likely to get the good results you’re looking for. Enter bad keywords and you’ll just get garbage back.

Our brains work the same way. If we ask them to look for ways to make something easy, creative and fun, our brains will search the database in our heads—as well as the environment around us—to find ways to make a task easy, creative and fun.

Or, we can focus our brains on how we hate doing the task. That it bores us to death. That we don’t have any clue how to do the thing in the first place, anyway. Or, that we are totally unfocused and don’t know what we should be doing at all.

The first way—looking for how to make the task easy, creative and fun, is…well…easy, creative and fun.

The second way—looking for all the reasons why we hate it or can’t do it is…beyond miserable.

When you ask your brain to come up with ways to make work you’ve been avoiding easy, creative and fun sometimes your brain will give you answers right away.

But more often it takes a little time. Those kinds of “aha!” answers tend to pop up when you are relaxed. Like in the shower. Or on a walk or drive. Anytime when your brain is otherwise “spinning” in a relatively relaxed way. And then up bubbles an “aha!” solution to a vexing problem.

Here’s a secret: You can influence how often those “aha’s!” pop up for you. In fact, that’s what the FocusCatalysts in this book are all designed to do.

Every FocusCatalyst generates really effective “keywords” to put into your search engine brain’s search field. If you relax, play with the FocusCatalysts, don’t work too hard at them or take them too seriously (they can get a bit touchy if you don’t let them play) then you’ll be able to take more focused, productive action than you ever dreamed possible.