Our best and most creative ideas are created from the things that occupy our fascination. When we allow ourselves to follow our fascinations, we can quickly accelerate the amount of good ideas we have, problems we can solve, and inspiration that we can harness. But often, we don’t. We allow the pace of our days, our responsibility, even stuff we love to keep us from the things that fascinate us. We chock our fascinations up to fantasy when the truth is they are the fuel for our future reality.
Renowned innovation expert Mitch Ditkoff has developed a formula for harnessing our fascination:
1. Suspend Reality. Find space to perform this exercise.
2. On a piece of paper, create three parallel headlines — the first, “What Fascinates Me,” the second, “People I Admire,” and the third, “What I Would Do If I Had More Time.”
3. Jot down at least five responses under each headline.
4. Look for connections between your various responses.
5. Write down your inspired ideas. Then, circle your favorite.
Once we have identified our fascinations, we become responsible for using them to help us be more creative, more efficient, and more aware of how the things we have been wired to love can help us change our worlds.
