The secret to a fulfilling life: Entertain your brain every day
Four exercises to discover novelty, surprise, and adventure in your life
As we are living through disruptive times and a technological revolution, we are about to see a remarkable decade full of innovation.
Self-driving vehicles, 3D printing, smart homes, self-repairing robots, voice assistant technologies, flying cars, reusable rockets… You name it.
As artificial intelligence is expected to replace 40% of all jobs in the next 15 years, we will witness the end of the job market as we know it. The jobs of tomorrow have not been invented yet.
In such disruptive times, you will need imagination, play, and curiosity more than ever. These will be the most hight sought skills in workplaces of tomorrow.
Why? Because you cannot program computers, machines, robots, or algorithms to be imaginative and curious. They can compete with humans on productivity, but not on deeper creativity.
Only humans are masters of curiosity and imagination. And these will remain our competitive advantage. We humans can waste a lot of time, but we are also masters of surprise, mystery, and adventure.
“You live in interesting times: Curiosity is your life jacket in these times.”
Fahri Karakas
Imagination, play, and curiosity are your best friends
In a world of crazy change and disruptive innovation, your brain needs to be active all the time. The best way to keep your brain active is to entertain it every day.
How can you do this?
You can best do this by being curious. Curiosity will help you use your mental muscles and enable you to develop new perspectives, ideas, and solutions.
As you are curious, your brain opens up to new worlds and possibilities. You start to detect patterns that you have never seen before.
When you are curious, your brain is able to imagine a new world that you have never seen before. Being able to imagine new possibilities and new worlds is becoming one of the most valuable skills in building the future.
When you are curious, you can build new systems, inventions, products, processes, and solutions that solve tomorrow’s problems. You can see things in fresh ways that you would not see otherwise.
When you are curious, you start searching for multiple answers and asking “Why?” questions. You do not stop at one right answer and seek unorthodox solutions. You stop taking things granted, and dig deeper. You learn to think independently and question everything.
When you are curious, you can search for solutions and innovations that are normally seen as unachievable by the experts. You discover how imagination matters more than knowledge, and how it is the engine of all inventions.
When you are curious, you can learn much faster because you are intrinsically motivated. Everything becomes more interesting and engaging for you. Your brain opens up, lights up with exciting possibilities, and becomes much stronger. Your brain is entertained and rewarded. Your hippocampus becomes a hub of stimulating neural activities and connections — think of thousands of bulbs. You can learn, remember, and grow much faster. You can build new connections among seemingly unrelated things — which is the basis of creativity.
When you are curious, you start playing and experimenting with exciting things. You can disrupt and create the next wave of discoveries. You dream about exciting possibilities that will enlarge your world and your universe.
Academy Award-winning producer Brian Grazer, wrote a book on curiosity called “A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life”. In this book, he explains how curiosity is the secret sauce in his career in Hollywood and on TV. Grazer had “curiosity conversations” with spies, royals, scientists, politicians, Nobel laureates, artists, and entrepreneurs. These conversations sparked the creative inspiration for his movies (i.e. Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind) and TV series (i.e. Arrested Development).
Grazer says curiosity is a superpower and a game-changer in his life: “Curiosity has helped me be a better boss, a better friend, a better businessman, a better dinner guest.
Curiosity is something that you can nurture and develop in your life. It depends on your consistent effort and practice.
You can create wonder and intrigue in your life by introducing elements of adventure and surprise in your life. You can also transform mundane tasks into interesting and enjoyable experiences through the magic of curiosity.
When you are actively interested in something, you will be more open to novel experiences and uncertainty. Openness to new experiences brings in more opportunities for adventure, discovery, fun, wonder, and delight.
Curiosity is simply your brain having fun. To entertain your brain, you can spend more time on engaging, enjoyable and meaningful activities (such as reading, learning, bonding with friends etc.)
When you entertain your brain, you will increase the quality of your life and your happiness as well.
How can you entertain your brain?
Below are four short exercises for you to start on a path of entertaining your brain.
If you do them, you will be rewarded and your brain will open up to new and exciting possibilities. Your life will be more adventurous and playful.
Are you ready?
Exercise 1: Entertain Your Brain
Please look at the poster below.
Go over the list of possible ideas and actions you can implement in your life.
I want you to think of one sample action for each of the items on this list. This action should be something practical and easy to do.
Write these actions down and start implementing them in your life now.
Schedule half an hour in your calendar every day to implement these actions and call it “Brain Entertainment” or “Brain Adventures”.
Exercise 2: Teasers and Puzzles
Please look at the poster below and do the exercises.
- You will create your own quotes.
- You will create your own lyrics and song.
- You will create your own dance moves and choreography.
- You will create your own inventions or products.
Please brainstorm, create ideas, and write down your ideas.
You can also record your voice or your video.
Have fun!
Exercise 3: Teasers and Puzzles
Please look at the poster below and do the exercises.
- You will create your own TV channel and weekly programming.
- You will create £500 value in one hour as a coach.
- You will create your own masterclass (online course).
- You will create your own fiction book (title and synopsis).
Please brainstorm, create ideas, and write down your ideas.
Enjoy the activities — please do them now.
Exercise 4 (Bonus): Ten awesome challenges that will entertain your brain
Here are 10 practical suggestions and creative challenges that you can implement to entertain your brain.
Think of them as challenges that will help you strengthen your mental muscles.
- When you watch a movie you love, think, and learn about its production process. How did they write the script? How did they create the characters? How did they shoot the movie? What were the challenges? How did they overcome these challenges? What do film critics say about the movie? What is the legacy of this movie? Capture these details in writing where you will try to turn them into insights and learning.
- Create 100 ideas every day — on any topic(s) or problem(s) you choose.
- Create a short video every day for 1 month — talk about 1 thing that excited you or spiked your curiosity on that day.
- Pick 10 random words and connect them to your next writing project. Use these 10 words in your story, fiction, blog, or article.
- Learn how to write code — your worldview will change after you do this. Software is eating the world. If you master the language of the software, you will master how this new world is being built code by code.
- Read 10 new books from 10 different areas during next month (which means you need to skim through and learn as much as you can from each book in just 3 days).
- Look at 50 Amazon bestseller book titles and their descriptions from diverse topics — fiction and non-fiction. What can you learn from their success stories? How did they capture interest and become bestsellers? How do they describe the promise of the book? How do they position themselves in a competitive book market? Can you build links among these titles — even if they are from unrelated domains?
- Do 7 Google searches every day about the topics and key terms you are curious about. Here are some examples that I have searched today: “What can I learn from the most creative entrepreneurs of our times?”, “Top 10 shocking future trends, technologies, and innovations”, “What can we learn from Elon Musk and Steve Jobs?”, “Top 100 cross-disciplinary thinkers in social sciences”, “Polymaths, Leonardo da Vinci, and Einstein”, “Mental Models of Charlie Munger”, “creativity and imagination exercises that you can use to create a lot of ideas”.
- Create a quiz on topics that you are curious about. For example, I recently became obsessed with Mars and created pop quiz questions that I asked my students during my lectures. I wrote an article summarizing these questions and answers. I also included futurist videos on Mars and turned this into a masterclass:
- Try to create a portfolio of multidisciplinary artwork that combines multiple methods such as video, drawing, painting, dance, theatre, poetry, design, storytelling, and creative writing, etc. Start with a coherent vision: What is your big picture? Imagine that you will create your own collages, constellations, and exhibition on this theme. After you are clear on your theme, start conducting experiments, playing with diverse media, and combining ideas. Try to create as many combinations and experiments as possible.
I hope you enjoyed these activities.
I hope you entertained your brain doing these.
Surviving and thriving in our fast-changing world requires us to go beyond today’s problems and methods.
We need to hunt and search for things that are fresh, novel, exciting, and unfamiliar.
We need to entertain our brains through play, curiosity, and imagination.
When we are curious, we will exercise our mental muscles and end up being more interesting, entertaining, enterprising, and intelligent individuals.
Towards a life of excitement and curiosity,
Sincerely;
Fahri
Fahri Karakas is the author of the Self-making Studio. You can explore more here.