Easy Lateral Thinking
There is a funny little story by Dr. Seuss about Mrs. McCave. She was the mother of 23 boys and named them all Dave. If you were to ask the average person, “Who is Dave?”, you will just get a normal answer, he is the guy that lives down the street, etc…but if you ask Mrs. McCave, then your answer will be a lot different, and pretty much confusing. What does this have to do with easy lateral thinking?
You can come up with the same confusing answer when you ask “what is thinking”. The reason is, there is no single way of thinking, there are so many ways that it cannot be asked by a simple question.
They say that a person can enjoy about anything except thinking. While this was actually meant to be a joke, it is also kind of sad. Thinking is essential to change, this is where our progress is made, and this is where our growth comes.
Another reason this is kind of funny, is that we all think, day in and day out, we are always thinking.
But do our thoughts always come up with new ideas or solutions; do they help us to grow? No, they don’t, a lot of our thinking can just be useless streams of thought.
So, then what is easy lateral thinking? This is taking our thinking and focusing on something in particular. It is a form of thought discipline.
Easy lateral thinking is a game of strategy. Typically we try to think without a strategy, and completely confuse everything. This is why thinking seems so difficult and frustrating. This is why we tend to avoid deep thinking.
When you introduce the strategy of easy later thinking, it can actually become fun, no more frustration, and you will amaze others with the incredible solutions and answers that you will come up with.
One of these famous ways of easy lateral thinking is:
Visual Thinking: This was named Gedanken, meaning “thought” in German. This is where you imagine a scenario that looks at and examines a question. Albert Einstein used this way of thinking. One of my favorite examples of his thinking is when he would imagine himself riding on a beam of light; this is how he came up with the Theory of Relativity.
