The Mind: Why its a Horrible Master and How to Squeeze the Most Out of it

Always love to hear and watch when two people I am fans of get together to chat and exchange ideas.  If you have read this blog you know about my man-crush on David Allen but I also very much enjoy the work Leo Laporte does on the TWIT network.  In February ’09 David and Leo connected on TWIT Live and exchanged some great ideas about how the mind works, why it is a horrible master and how to squeeze the most out of it.  Watch the video and read some of the main ideas below presented below:

• When you hold something in your mind it has no sense of past or future – it thinks you should be doing it all the time psychologically which is why it will wake you up at 3 in the morning and beat you bloody about something you cant do anything about while you are lying in bed.

• Its telling you that you need to go buy batteries when in fact you cant buy batteries from bed at 3 in the morning.

• Once you get it out the brain calms down and lets go.  The brain realizes it no longer needs to hang on to that and will allow you to renegotiate that agreement with yourself.

• You cant renegotiate agreements you cant remember you made so you have to get them out of your head and look at them and say, ‘no, not right now!’ (thus the importance of having a ubiquitous capture tool at hand at all times)

• You mind is for having ideas but not hanging on to them.

• Your mind needs to be free to express and expand… so the more you can trust that on the back end that you have an executive process that can handle things the more freedom it will have on the front end