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Five big discoveries about personal effectiveness

  In short, when trying to solve a complex task, people who were distracted after first tackling the problem did better than people who put in conscious effort. 3. We’re more creative when thinking about others Creativity in the business world is increasingly important. Creativity often involves viewing things from different perspectives. New findings show […]
Jaclyn Densley
Five big discoveries about personal effectiveness

 

In short, when trying to solve a complex task, people who were distracted after first tackling the problem did better than people who put in conscious effort.

3. We’re more creative when thinking about others

Creativity in the business world is increasingly important. Creativity often involves viewing things from different perspectives. New findings show that we are more creative when we think of others solving problems instead of ourselves.

To test this, professors Evan Polman and Kyle Emich presented 137 undergraduates with this riddle: “A prisoner was attempting to escape from a tower. He found a rope in his cell that was half as long enough to permit him to reach the ground safely. He divided the rope in half, tied the two parts together, and escaped. How could he have done this?”

Half the participants were asked to imagine themselves as the prisoner locked inside the tower (we’ll call them the “prisoner group”) and the other half were asked to imagine someone else trapped in the prison (“imaginary group”).

In the prisoner group, 48% of participants solved the riddle, but in the imaginary group, 66% were able to solve the riddle. In a second experiment, the same professors asked participants to draw an alien that someone else might use to write about in a short story. In a third, participants had to come up with gift ideas for themselves, someone close to them, and someone they barely knew. If you wondering if you made the right call, the answer is in this article.

In the results across all three experiments, Polman and Emich found that participants were more creative or had better solutions when thinking for someone else. This is an intriguing finding with many implications and applications for creative problem solving. Just try to imagine someone else coming up with good ideas for using this finding …

4. It’s not napping – it’s constructive rest

We live in a time when where more people are staying connected on vacations. People have forgotten how important it is for your mind to rejuvenate. Research shows that naps improve productivity – a growing body of evidence shows that taking regular breaks from mental tasks improves productivity and creativity — and that skipping breaks can lead to stress and exhaustion.

(I’ll be right back … zzz)

John P Trougakos, an assistant management professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Rotman School of Management, compares the brain to any other muscle in the body. Similarly to how muscles become fatigued after repeated and sustained use, so does the brain after sustained mental exertion. The brain needs a rest period before it can recover, he explains.