Drawing a Blank, literally
Wednesday, April 26th, 2006I haven’t been blogging about it much yet, but I’ve been really intrigued by Ed de Bono’s stuff on Six Thinking Hats and Lateral Thinking.
Lateral Thinking is supposed to help me break out of my rut patterns and think more creatively when solving a problem. Well, I have a problem I need to solve and I’m in a rut. So I tried a randomizing technique from Lateral Thinking just now–finding a random word in a random book on my bookshelf. This random word would serve as a provocation to get me thinking “outside the box,” as it were.
So I generate out of thin air the numeric sequence 14,10,20.
I then turned and grabbed the 14th book off my shelf (Bowling Alone, by Putnam–one of the many books on my shelf that I’ve almost read), opened to page number 10 to look for the 20th word.
Wanna guess how many words are on page 10? Zero.
A blank page.
Is God trying to tell me something about my problem, or what?
Thanks, de Bono.
