How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

Part IV
will show you some techniques for raising
your game and giving you more of the creativity, wisdom, and insight you
need to ace your day. And if you’re already feeling sharp and ready for
anything—well, these techniques will take your performance to a whole
new level.

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ELEVEN
Reaching Insight
We all recognize the feeling of getting bogged down in a task. You might be an
accountant trying to figure out why your numbers won’t add up, or an artist
whose muse has gone missing—very different jobs, but a similar sensation:
you’re stuck in a loop with ideas that aren’t working, and you can’t see a way
out. To make progress at times like these, we need the kind of breakthrough that
comes from 
insight
: that “aha” flash of understanding that results in our
suddenly seeing a new solution.
Peggy, a successful freelance art director in Chicago, is someone whose work
requires a lot of those “aha” moments. As an independent contractor, she’s
frequently pitching for interesting jobs at advertising agencies, making it
particularly important for her to be able to impress people quickly with her
creative ideas. What’s more, she’s found that “really good work often looks like
nothing I’ve done before,” she says. “Tweaking what’s worked in the past only
gets you so far. Making big leaps usually requires a different approach to the
problem, where you connect the dots in a new way.”
The scientific evidence suggests she’s absolutely right on this. Our efficient
brains have automatic routines for dealing with everything from writing emails
to brushing our teeth—and given half a chance, our neural networks will also
save effort by continuing to think along existing pathways, coming up with
incremental variations on old ideas. As a result, psychologists have long
observed something they call the 
Einstellung effect
, where having an existing
solution in mind makes it harder for us to see a radically different but better way
to solve our problem.
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So if what we want is 
new
thinking, we need to help our
brains get out of a rut, to stimulate lots of 
new
connections. What can we do to
give ourselves the best chance of that? Plenty, it turns out.