Discuss: Optimising the Power of the Mind

Welcome to Thinking Club guest, Jonathan Langrell of Our Manly, who proposed a compelling Thinking Club discussion.

How can we create an optimally super-abundant mind? A 24 hour day being that yields an 18 hour day (excluding human and machine external leverage)? Would we want to?

This sparked a vocal and spirited conversation among the group during which we unleashed an arsenal of Thinker Tools.

Thinker Rules
We began by insisting on a point of order – if we were to generate a worthy list of possibilities we needed to suspend any limitations on the discussion. So we dropped the exclusion of human and machine leverage and allowed any thought to exist.

We agreed that once every avenue had been explored and the list created, we could then re-insert the criteria to judge each suggestion on its merit. But during a session: Thinking Club rules clearly state, that suspension of disbelief and no judgements are pre-requisites.

The concept of time
And so we began. First an opening conversation around the concept of time. This was rounded out with input from Zimbardo and Boyd’s fascinating study, The Time Paradox, in which they present six major attitudes towards time and time perspective. Taken from cross-cultures and eons they suggest ways in which to manipulate time’s effects.

The relativity of time
We talked about time ‘relativity’ and how we frame our references of time. We discussed that simply by restating one’s idea of time – shifting our attitude toward it or ‘changing our lens’ (a Thinker Tool oft called upon) one could manipulate its effects.

Redefining our sleep patterns
This led to an exploration of time usage and an awareness of circadian rhythms and sleep management. We referenced famous success stories who live only by ‘cat-naps’ and spoke of how international pilots use the technique to manage their long-haul flights.

The point was raised that if we redefine our sleep patterns we have the possibility of creating more time in our day. This was not so much to ‘sleep less’ as one’s body reacts negatively if it is sleep deprived, but instead to approach sleep in shift patterns and boost productivity between each mini-sleep.

Mind-altering time
As we further explored the idea of altering our lens on time, other more impactful ways of mind-altering arose. We discussed how both mental illnesses and mind-altering drugs can have effects on the brain which change one’s perception of time. This could affect a feeling of productivity – but at what point does reality impact on belief systems. What if one simply felt productive but was in fact lying around ‘doing’ nothing.

Doing nothing is doing something
Conversation quickly sprung to the defense of ‘doing nothing’ and how freeing the mind from activity can sometimes allow it to become increasingly sharper, more creative and achieve significant break-throughs.

Lucid Dreaming then came up as a tool for being able to maneuver a situation into a positive outcome through having ‘practised it’ during stillness or meditation.

Such thoughts focused our thinking on physiology and training the body to continue operating at various levels of consciousness so that we never wasted one minute in ‘sleeping’. We talked of optimal ‘flow-states’ where one is in the right frame of mind to see and act upon any situation to one’s best advantage and how this would achieve extreme effectiveness. This is why super-successful people seem comparatively to achieve so much more than an average operator in their respective lifetimes.

Achieving super-success
Speaking of success turned to the ‘Four Hour a Day Working Week’. How outsourcing every menial task can buy back literally hours of one’s life and allow extreme focus on one core activity thereby gaining ultimate success. Malcolm Gladwell’s, Outliers, also cover this notion – that success is led by the repetition of a task for over 10000 hours and not merely by sheer natural-born talent.

Outsourcing time and relationships
We talked of how in mastering time – technology can be turned to our advantage. How automated voicemail, no face-to-face contact and standardised replies can increase productivity times over. However the group shunned the thought of becoming automotons in favour of efficiency.

So leveraging relationships became the ultimate multi-tasking opportunity. Having others do everything for you. Ultimately realising that to have total control one must completely relinquish it.

Tapping into primordial consciousness
This raised the notion of human spiritual connectivity and tapping into shared knowledge so that each individual member of society would not have to repeat the learnings of those prior. Many experts refer to the instinctual primordial brain and we saw this as an untapped resource.

Coming to a Time Vortex near you
The ideal scenario propose building a Time Vortex to which one could escape the march of time and be allowed free reign to explore while the rest of the world moved forward. The individual emerging from the Time Vortex could have experienced lifetimes yet seemingly not aged a bit.

Practical time-saving solutions
Everyone had a multitude of suggestions on what they would do with their time had they more of it. Our practical everyday solutions for wresting more of it back were to:

• create space

• allow time
• share ideas
• be selective in who/what we give our time to
• pinpoint and focus on developing select skills

In summary
Timeliness is not something we try and create, but simply allow. To increase our life and enjoy its moments, we must take the pressure off achieving.

Put simply:
Get out of life’s way and let it happen. Then, the optimal will naturally occur.