3 Original Habits to Influence People
Be original and dedicate your talents to uniqueness
It’s easy to find our uniqueness, but many prejudices influence us. Those influences easily transport us to places far from our singularity.
The exercise of searching for our uniqueness works well when we have the emotional maturity to practice deep thinking.
Emotional maturity is not exclusive to wonder people. It’s about our willingness to become aware of our emotions and knowing how to deal with them at any age.
Deep thinking also requires a lot of in-depth mindfulness. It requires tranquility, concentration, and focus. To practice deep thinking, we have to be open enough to identify our weaknesses and manage them in a conscious and balanced way.
It’s usually our minds that create different personas. Our subconscious impacts us more often than we think, so this exercise of deep thinking and developing emotional maturity is nothing more than a filter in your mind to help you find your singularity- your uniqueness.
Only when you’re emotionally mature can you have the internal capacity to find your real self. That flow within is what permits you to manage your own emotions.
Like it or not, your emotions guide your life. They can hinder your relationship with yourself and damage relationships with friends, family, or companions.
Deep thinking is often used in technology nowadays. With artificial intelligence gaining power and disrupting technological markets, deep thinking and deep learning are the ultimate weapons in our society today.
Deep thinking is the construction of conceptual systems. For computers, it helps them make decisions through different data. With us, humans, the construction of conceptual systems helps us redesign the perception of our emotions.
It’s the ultimate mirror that permits us to look at our minds and create or rebuild new concepts- especially those that bring us closer to our emotions’ real manifestations.
Emotional maturity and deep thinking can not only support embracing our uniqueness but also enhance our originality.
Here are three original habits to get you closer to your uniqueness.
Creativity is allowing ourselves to make mistakes. Art is knowing what mistakes to keep.
Some people complain about the lack of originality in the world. Some say we would be better if more people had original ideas.
Yet, the problem is not the number of original ideas. They come every day for all sorts of people. The problem is the lack of capacity to select the best ideas.
When Segway was invented, a lot of people thought it would be a revolution in transportation. It wasn’t. Segway was a false positive.
Seinfeld was rejected by all TV broadcasts. One year later, some executives begged for four more episodes to be made. Seinfeld took off and made 1 billion dollars of profits. Seinfeld was a false negative.
1) Create ideas and select the best
Us writers are creators of ideas. Some of them are borrowed and given out personal spin. Others are original- ideas that popped into our heads- without us knowing how or why. Ideas come to us in a course of thought, something we were reading, or a conversation we were having with friends.
The best way to become better at evaluating our ideas is to listen to other’s opinions. Lizz Winstead, The Daily Show creator, even today- doesn’t know for sure what makes people laugh. She usually tests new jokes with her audience. More recently, she wrote some jokes on Twitter. When she receives at least twenty-five retweets, she immediately makes a note to test them.
I suspect that Tim Denning does the same on his Twitter.
Michael Thompson usually tests his articles out with his family and friends before publishing them.
Selecting the best ideas usually comes from outside our own heads. If we test our beliefs, thoughts, or work with external people, we can get their feedback- on which original ideas to embrace and then transform them into fabulous pieces of writing.
2) Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow
When we procrastinate, we’re intentionally postponing work that has to be done. Even if we’re thinking about the task, we’re also postponing it to do less critical activities.
Some doctoral studies argue that when we postpone a task, we make time for divergent thinking instead of focusing on a specific idea.
The night before the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Martin Luther King, Jr. was scribbling his notes to prepare his speech to over 100,000 people. Guests as honorable as Rosa Parks and Jackie Robinson of civil rights, the actors Marlon Brando and Sidney Poitier, and the singers Harry Belafonte and Bob Dylan were also present.
After so much procrastination, Luther King Jr. left one sentence that will remain throughout human history.
I have a dream.
Intentionally procrastinating to stimulate divergent thinking is a feature of the originals. Those who know how to feed the flows of ideas to produce something epic empower their uniqueness.
But, surprisingly, when I studied the originals, I learned that the advantages of acting quickly and being the first are offset by the disadvantages.- Adam Grant in Original: How non-conformists move the world
3) The positive power of negative thinking
There are two strategies to deal with thought challenges: strategic optimism and defensive pessimism.
Strategic optimists predict the best and predict reasonable outcomes. Defensive pessimists think the worst and believe that everything will go the wrong way.
Ironically, defensive pessimists perform as well or better than the strategic optimists. This phenomenon in which people imagine worst-case scenarios to manage their anxiety actually gets better results.
What defensive pessimists do next is essential: To avoid all of those bad things, they get better prepared which results in being more relaxed in the long-term.
According to Julie Norem, a psychology professor at Wellesley College, trying to force positivity is a bad strategy for the genuinely anxious. In her book The Positive Power Of Negative Thinking, Norem offers convincing evidence that, for many people, positive thinking is an ineffective strategy. In her own research, Norem provides proof of the powerful benefits of “defensive pessimism.” especially for millions of people who want to manage anxiety and perform epic events.
Final Thought
Us writers find ourselves suffering so often after reading our first drafts. We often think that the job is poorly done, that readers will hate it, and that no one will reread our work. Does this sound familiar?
Try out a little defensive pessimism. See if it works for you. You never know until you give it a chance.
If you procrastinate a little more and let divergent thinking flow through your mind, you’ll enter the flow zone and perhaps create your next viral article.
For that, you have to select the best idea of all. But don’t forget that the best feedback comes from the outside. Make your best friends and family a part of your creativity. Let them criticize your words and you’ll find out that the best of all ideas will emerge- then, you’ll rock like never before.
In the unique mix of your originality, you will find the simple singularity within you. By opening your mind to outside input, you’ll slowly become closer to genuine uniqueness in the quietness of your morning writings.
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