Grasping opportunity by developing good thinking habits

You can’t find opportunity if you go about with your eyes closed—or even just by looking straight ahead. You need to look around properly if you want to find good ideas.

There seems to be something about the way the human mind works that makes us see things in black and white. I don’t mean we see things without color—which is true only if you’re color blind—but that we often see things simply and don’t want to accept the complexity of things. There’s something to be said for keeping things simple. It can help us to get things done. But when it comes to finding and grasping opportunity, it can be a serious disadvantage.

The reason that human beings like to see things simply is that the human brain seems to seek patterns. Once it has found a pattern it makes the decision that the pattern explains how something works. Anything that doesn’t fit into the pattern is then disregarded. It’s the same with developing categories for things. We develop categories to sort things. After that anything that doesn’t fit into a category is disregarded or placed into a category of “miscellaneous” because it doesn’t “fit”.

An even bigger problem occurs when we don’t just disregard something that doesn’t fit with our view of the world or our self-created “system”—we just don’t see it at all. To all intents and purposes, it doesn’t exist. This leads to what can be called “idea blindness”.

Closed Thinking

This type of thinking is natural to human beings. We categorize and seek patterns in order to make sense of the world, and it is useful from that point of view. But what isn’t useful is when this type of thinking stops us from thinking further and grasping opportunities that are sometime staring us in the face.

This type of thinking—this narrow type of thinking—is so prevalent not because it is natural, but mainly because it is supported by many powerful forces around us such as politics and the media, and some types of religions. Politics thrives on black-and-white thinking. It is usually impossible for a politician to accept that there’s something positive in a rival’s ideas without appearing weak-minded. In politics, one politician is right, another wrong; one party is right, another wrong. It never occurs to politicians that everybody might be wrong, or that everybody might be part-right and part-wrong. Black-and-white thinking is the curse of politics, causes rancorous disagreements, and is the reason most politicians are incapable of actually getting anything done on time.

Religions traditionally have been riddled with this type of dogmatic thinking, a notable exception being Buddhism and especially Zen Buddhism, which has a non-dualistic view of the world. The media, which reports on politics, embraces this type of thinking wholesale and uses it as a framework for reporting on news events, which compounds the belief that this black-and-white thinking is the only type of thinking there is.

But just because this type of thinking pervades much of our politics, religion and media, it doesn’t have to be like that on an individual level. Sometimes we do need to see things in black-and-white and stick to our guns, but for the most part this type of thinking is unhelpful because it can mean missing opportunities—for self-development, for making money, for improving things in all sorts of ways.

When we engage in narrow thinking we think we see what’s in front of us, but we don’t actually see it at all. We only see the stuff that we can easily categorize, or stuff we agree with. It’s like walking about with blinkers and expecting to be able to have a full vista, or, even worse, walking about with a blindfold and expecting to see anything at all.

A new type of thinking

How can we get out of black-and-white thinking and into full-color spectrum thinking? How can we begin to see more of the opportunities around us?

The first thing that needs to be done is to get rid of the belief that ideas belong to people. They don’t. Ideas belong to no-one in particular and to everyone in general. Once we understand this, we can see the idea or way of doing things for what it is. We can see it bare, without all the emotional baggage that come from believing that it belongs to a particular point of view and so doesn’t “fit” into your way of seeing things.

Once you begin to look at ideas as just that—“ideas”—you can begin to see the huge potential that exists for creating something yourself, improving yourself, getting things done in a more efficient way.

One way that can be useful is to use what I call the “True, but…” technique, which should be used only on your own ideas and beliefs, not on those of other people (After all we want to find good things we can use, not cast a pall of negativity over other people’s stuff). Examine your own ideas and beliefs, ways of doing things with this sentence and finish it by writing down times when your belief, or system does not hold true. Then you can start to see places where someone else’s ideas might be a good fit.

If you find that you really do have a chronic case of narrow thinking and just the thought of working with a new idea makes veins stand out on your temple, try telling a little white lie to yourself. Tell yourself that you aren’t accepting an idea by trying it. Say that you are investigating it. This gives you the opportunity to ditch the idea if you find that it really doesn’t work, or that a certain set of circumstances really isn’t an opportunity—though you may well be surprised.

Sure, you need to make sure that the idea does fit in with what you are trying to achieve, rather than chasing every idea blindly. But to discount ideas just because they seem foreign is a big mistake. You could be discounting the very thing you need to succeed.

ideas opportunity thinking Zen Buddhism