Accidental Genius

Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content

Mark Levy

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781605096520
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: R&D
• Index: Business

"Mark Levy teaches readers a wonderful mental technology, freewriting, that helps you dive deep into your unconscious to discover treasures."—B. J. Bueno, coauthor of The Power of Cult Branding When it comes to creating ideas, we hold ourselves back. That's because inside each of us is an internal editor whose job is to forever polish our thoughts so we sound smart and in control and so we fit into society. But what happens when we encounter problems where such conventional thinking fails us? How do we get unstuck? For Mark Levy, the answer is freewriting, a technique he's used for years to solve all types of business problems and generate ideas for books, articles, and blog posts. Freewriting is deceptively simple: start writing as fast as you can, for as long as you can, about a subject you care deeply about, while ignoring the standard rules of grammar and spelling. Your internal editor won't be able to keep up with your output—you'll generate breakthrough ideas and solutions that you couldn't have created any other way. Levy shares his six secrets to freewriting as well as fifteen problem-solving and creativity-stimulating principles you can use if you need more firepower—seven of which are new to this edition. Also new to this edition: an extensive section on how to refine your raw freewriting into something you can share with the world. "Whether you have writer's block, face a tight deadline, or just don't know how to get across all those wonderful ideas rambling around in the back of your head, Mark Levy has the solution for you." —B. Joseph Pine II, coauthor of The Experience Economy

Part One
The Six Secrets to Freewriting

We all have an internal editor that cleans up what we’re thinking so we can sound smart and in control, and so that we can fit in. This editor helps us live politely among other people, but it hurts our ability to think differently and powerfully.

Freewriting temporarily forces the editor into a subservient role, so you can get to thoughts that are raw, truthful, and unusual. It’s from thoughts like these that big ideas are more likely to come.

Here are what I consider the technique’s six easy-to-use secrets …

Chapter 1
Secret #1:
Try Easy

Robert Kriegel, business consultant and “mental coach” for world-class athletes, tells a story in one of his books that has critical implications for you in your quest to lead a better life through writing.

Kriegel was training a sizable group of sprinters who were battling for the last spots in the Olympic trials. During a practice run, Kriegel found his runners to be “tense and tight”—victims, apparently, of “a bad case of the Gotta’s.”

Conventional wisdom would have dictated that these highly skilled athletes train harder, but Kriegel had another idea. He asked them to run again, only this time they were to relax their efforts and run at about nine-tenths their normal intensity. Of this second attempt, Kriegel writes:

The results were amazing! To everyone’s surprise, each ran faster the second time, when they were trying “easy.” And one runner’s time set an unofficial world record.

Fine for running, but does that idea hold for any pursuit? Kriegel continues: “The same is true elsewhere: Trying easy will help you in any area of your life. Conventional Wisdom tells us we have to give no less than 110 percent to keep ahead. Yet conversely, I have found that giving 90 percent is usually more effective.”

For freewriting, too, Kriegel’s “easy” notion hits the nail on its relaxed head.

Rather than approach your writing with your teeth gritted, demanding instant, virtuoso solutions from yourself, loosen up and ease into your best 90 percent effort. Here’s how:

Begin your writing by reminding yourself to try easy. I liken this to the prep work of a baseball player stepping into the batter’s box. The player adjusts his batting glove and cup, spits, kicks at the dirt, stares at the barrel of his bat, and eases into a few practice swings. These rituals accomplish two things: They allow the hitter to set up the mechanics of his swing, and they get him in the correct frame of mind to face a pitch.

That’s what I’m asking you to do. Get your mechanics down, then do a psych job on yourself. Or, put another way: Start scribbling, then remind yourself that you’re simply looking to put some decent words and ideas down on the page; you’re not trying to produce deathless prose and world-beating ideas in the course of a single night’s writing.

I’ve opened my computer’s freewriting file to find a few examples of how I remind myself to try easy. I don’t have to look far.

Nearly every entry begins with a reminder, invocation, plea, entreaty, or declaration of assurance from me to myself to stay centered during the writing and not expect wisdom, insight, or shining prose. Most of the time, I don’t specifically say to myself, “Try easy,” although the sentiment is there. Here are some samples:

Remove the “Mighty Specialness” of writing, until there’s nothing to stop you. This kind of writing is dirt simple, like putting on a sock.

Just some brain-draining, some noodling, going on here. Don’t expect lightning bolts.

Okay, a little sticking here to start, like a computer key that hasn’t been deep struck for a while. Keep moving and the stickiness may or may not leave, but at least you’ll be moving.

Here it is, on the line. I’m squeezing some words onto the page, but I’m scaring myself with demands of originality. If words don’t come out of me in interesting arrangements, tasty strings, then my writing fingers slow down, my mind stops. Wait, Mark. That kind of thinking is going to guarantee you no new ideas. Better just forge ahead, and get some stuff onto the page—great or stink-o.

These are hardly inspiring openings, I grant you. But if you, like me, suffer from wanting to accomplish too much, right away, an honest attempt to calm your expectations can improve the quality of your thinking in the long run. You, though, might be wondering, will all this self-reassurance act as an anchor on my thinking and weigh it down far below what is helpful? Might I, in effect, be courting my own dumbness?

The answer is no. Despite your pleas and cautious self-instruction, your mind still begs to solve problems and do extraordinary work. By giving yourself this “try easy” ground rule, you’ll ease up on your perfectionistic demands and give your rampaging mind more room to maneuver.

But wait, I have another way—a way virtually guaranteed to move you into that “try easy” zone.

Points to Remember

• A relaxed 90 percent is more efficient than a vein-bulging 100 percent effort.

• When you begin freewriting about a thorny subject, remind yourself to “try easy.”

Chapter 2
Secret #2:
Write Fast and
Continuously

That’s right: When you write fast and continuously, you pretty much have to adopt an easy, accepting attitude—you don’t have much choice.

My assertion—that fast, continuous writing improves thought by relaxing you—needs clarification, though: Just how fast? Just how continuous?

First, just how fast? I’d say about as fast as your hand moves when you scribble a note to your best office buddy, saying “Couldn’t wait for you anymore, went to lunch at Giuseppe’s,” because your colleagues were already piling into a car. You know, fast.

By writing fast, you invite your mind to operate at a pace that’s closer to its normal rate of thought, rather than the lethargic crawl you usually subject it to when you write sluggishly.

Here’s what I mean, crafted into an experiment: In your mind, summon up the image of something that happened to you yesterday—a meeting with the boss, a decision you made about the market, whatever. Take pen and paper, and start to write about that image, but write slowly, perhaps at half your normal speed. Spend a few seconds on each word, as your hand traces out the line and curve of each letter. Keep this slowness going for two minutes.

Difficult, isn’t it? Did you find, in a sense, that your mind followed your body, that your thinking slowed down to accommodate the snail’s pace of your hand? It’s almost as if your mind were saying, “Why should I give that situation a good thinking through, if my hand isn’t going to have time to record what I’m pondering? Nuts to this.” Your mind then either slowed down to match your hand speed, or it wandered off and distracted itself in trivia.

Now do the opposite. Conjure up the same image, but use the next two minutes to get it down on paper twice as fast as you normally would. You needn’t push yourself toward bionic speed—just move as quickly as you can without cramping your hand. Try for, say, forty words in a minute. If you want to vary your speed, by all means do, but don’t drop back too far. And if you want to talk to yourself on the paper as you’re speeding along (“This feels interesting, but awkward”), go ahead and talk.

How was that for a difference? Forget about the quality of your words, and just look at the product of your labor. You’ve doubtless used ten times the amount of ink, gotten further in your story, and shown more advanced thinking than you did at your slow speed. You may not have done anything impressive yet, but you’ve demonstrated to yourself, in a small way, that there’s a radically different level of thinking going on when you write at a speed closer to the speed of thought.

On to the second question: Just how continuous?

I’d say about as continuous as your grip on the report you spent weeks preparing, only to find out that you didn’t address the issue dearest to your CEO’s heart. You know, continuous.

By writing continuously, you force the edit-crazy part of your mind into a subordinate position, so the idea-producing part can keep spitting out words.

What I just wrote is true, but somehow the rich ideas bundled up in that lone sentence need more room to breathe. If your attention inadvertently lagged eight seconds back—maybe your toddler plopped her plate of spaghetti on her head like a hat, or a passing car blared its radio—you’d miss one of the most critical conceptual statements in the book. Here, then, is that same sentence, with its root ideas unbundled, expanded, restated, and dressed up in smart-looking bullet points:

• If your mind knows your hand won’t stop moving, it’ll ease up on trying to edit out your “inappropriate” and underdeveloped thoughts.

• Normally, your controlling mind censors you because it wants you to look good to yourself and to your public. Now, though, it knows it’s been backed into an impossible position; it can’t possibly examine your rapidly appearing thoughts for public correctness, so it recedes into the background.

• Your “inappropriate” thoughts are where the action is, and the more quickly you get to them, the more effectively you can fashion solutions for yourself.

• What are “inappropriate” thoughts? They are bone-honest notions you wouldn’t normally air in public, things like “I hate my payables department” and “Just for kicks, I wonder what kind of products we would have to invent if we junked our cash cow?” These thoughts, in large part, contain your genius. They’re where your originality and distinction reside.

• Your continuous writing acts, in a sense, like a brainstorming session with yourself, but in many ways it’s better than traditional brainstorming. While traditional brainstorming asks you to withhold judgment on spontaneously voiced ideas, we all know that’s impossible. In public, you can curb your judgment a little, but you can never completely suspend it. In your freewriting, however—since no one but you will likely see it, and your edit-crazy mind is napping—you can access your wildest associations without fear of reprisal.

• Because you have to come up with something to say while you’re writing continuously, you stay focused on what you’re writing. You know that if you lose your place, you’ll have to stop, double back, and pick up the thread of your logic, thus breaking your self-made promise to write continuously. Your normal writing approach doesn’t have this Zen-like, stay-in-the-moment focus.

• Continuous writing shows you that individual thoughts are cheap, since you always have new ones following on the heels of current ones. But what if you have to stop because you’ve run out of things to say? Write meaningless stuff while you wait for your mind to redirect you. That’s right: vacuous, senseless, meaningless stuff.

• Babble onto the page: “I went to the hen for twice times two phone drake dreg parala …”

• Repeat the last word you wrote: “The data show show show show show show …”

• Or just repeat the last letter you struck on your keyboard: “The profit I I I I I I I I I I I I I I …”

• Just keep your writing hand revved up and occupied, while your mind quickly considers its options, and then get on to a new thought.

Got it, then? The plan is to move fast and don’t stop writing, with the understanding that the more words you pile onto the page, even if they’re lousy words, the better your chance at finding a usable idea.

In the freewriting game, think quantity before quality. As sci-fi great Ray Bradbury says about story writing: “You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you get comfortable in the medium.” To apply it to freewriting, I’d change this quote to read: “Write with a fast, haphazard hand, because you’ll need to burn through all the awful stuff you smear onto the page in order to get to something halfway decent.” That’s the way to think: The bad brings the good, and there’s no way around this natural order.

Points to Remember

• If you write as quickly as your hand can move or your fingers can type, and you continue to generate words without stopping, astonishing things will happen. Your mind will eventually give you its grade A, unadulterated thoughts to put on the paper because it realizes it won’t be criticized (no one but you will see them), and you might be able to use them (thoughts can be tweaked and developed, once they’re on paper).

• If you temporarily run out of things to say, keep your mind and hand in motion by repeating the last word or letter you wrote. You can accomplish the same thing by babbling onto the page in a nonsensical, scat language.

• Your best thought comes embedded in chunks of your worst thought. What’s the only way to reliably mine your best thought? Write a lot. Think “quantity.” Think “word production.” Think of yourself as a word and thought factory.

Chapter 3
Secret #3:
Work Against
a Limit

Let’s apply some of the information you’ve learned so far. Se...