Unleash Your Subconscious

Markus Mooslechner is a prolific writer, director, and documentarian from Vienna, Austria. He hosts the Space Cafe Podcast, which features leading thinkers in the space industry, and he’s also designing a FutureLab at CERN.

I met him at SXSW this week, and over lunch, we got onto the topic of coming up with new ideas for projects. I told him I’m something of a purveyor of techniques for “escaping the tyranny of reason,” as David Ogilvy called that which keeps conventional thinkers from “original thinking.”

Markus told me, “Whenever I’m stuck on a problem or project, I love to do freewriting. It’s a great technique for bringing new ideas to the surface.” Intrigued, I asked for a step by step lesson. It’s fairly straightforward:

1) Loosely consider take the problem in hand
2) With notebook and pen in hand, start a timer for five minutes
3) Stop thinking
4) Write stream-of-consciousness whatever comes to the page
5) The only two rules: never stop writing, and never think about what you’re writing
6) After the timer goes off, read what you wrote — it will be “mostly gibberish”
7) Highlight words or phrases that stand out without over thinking
8) Consider how these words might seed an idea, or a direction to pursue

“The goal is to reduce the activity of the conscious mind, as it can be very limiting.” This of course reminded me of one of my favorite Ogilvy-isms: “The majority of business men are incapable of original thinking because they are unable to escape the tyranny of reason.” (Here are some techniques Ogilvy employed to reach escape velocity.)

I told Markus that his goal of reducing activity of the conscious mind reminded me of the old adage, “The history of innovation is the bed, the bus, and the bathtub,” when he jumped: “Oh! The bathtub is my absolute favorite! Many times, I jump out of the tub and run to my wife, saying, ‘I’ve got the solution to everything!’ She’s seen this enough times to say, ‘Let’s see how it looks in the morning…’”

Any other techniques, Markus?

“I go running. When I go far enough, the conscious mind ceases, and I’m able to get into my subconscious then, too.”

It never ceases to amaze me how often such radical strategies are responsible for a breakthrough. What impressed me about Markus is that he’d had enough experience to know that he could leverage them at will. Like Joyce Carole Oates, walking up that same hill where she often finds here ideas waiting for her.

For a similar step-by-step guide to a foundational tool of design, check out David Kelley’s Mind Map lesson here.

What about you? What’s your go-to technique to achieve escape velocity?

Related: Escaping the Tyranny of Reason
Related: Take A Walk
Related: Map Your Mind
Related: Allow Your Mind To Wander

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