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Habits are interesting. We all struggle with them. We want to improve the good ones and we try hard to lose the bad ones.

Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit examines the structure of habits and demonstrates how they can be changed. One thing I didn’t realize is that during habitual activity our “thinking” activity actually lowers. It makes some sense – habital activity becomes subconscious and therefore the level of conscious thought is lower.

In the case of non-habitual behaviors, participants were thinking about what they were doing for 70% of the reports.

For habitual responses, thought-action correspondence was significantly lower, and participants were thinking about what they were doing for only 40% of the reports.

Duke University - David T. Neal and Wendy Wood

The significance of this insight is that relying on habitual behavior in creative activity could be the reason your thinking is just not as effective as it could be. But there is good news.

Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power becomes easier to grasp, and the only option left is to get to work.

‘The Power of Habit’ reviewed by The New York Times

It’s understandable that the thought of working on your habits is not appealing. Before you get frightened off it may be easier than you think. Lets take a look at the structure of a habit.

… he presents a simple scheme called “the habit loop,” whereby an environmental cue automatically leads to a behavioral routine that results in a reward.

‘The Power of Habit’ reviewed by The New York Times

The three key parts to a habit as proposed the in the Power of Habit book are:

• the cue or trigger
• the routine or pattern (of behavior)
• and the reward

What is the value of knowing this in the context of creative thinking? What do we need to do?

The easiest way is to change some of our routines. Changing or interrupting  our patterns of behavior, even for a short time, can enable new thinking. Here are some suggestions on how to go about it.

So what can you do to fight the routine bug? You may be surprised how easy it is. Here are 10 easy-to-apply tips to help you break routine and constantly renew, refresh and recharge yourself to stay ahead.

Prabhjit Singh - Corporate and Workplace Creativity

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I love it when someone takes a widely accepted form and adds a simple concept to come up with a really great idea. What’s really great about this ides is that it’s also a catalyst for change.

Let’s take a look at Dice for Change©

Many of us strive to be a better person. To take better care of ourselves, to be more kind to one another or to improve the world we live in.

These three dice are designed to help you start and act on what you care about. Simply roll the dice to introduce new routines into your life in a playful way and notice how even small and simple actions have a greater positive effect on life.

DiceForChange is a concept by Creative Heroes, a creation studio in the Netherlands.

If interested DiceForChange can be purchased from Amazon.com

So why is this product so good?

No barrier to use:

Dice are a well known form and have been in our culture for thousands of years. This means that we don’t need to be trained on how to use them. They fit nicely in our hands – very tactile.  They require no training and no skill.

Easy to understand:

It’s a well used cliché but a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case a very simple picture or icon communicates a broad concept and action.

The power of incremental change:

There are a lot of great ideas out there. A many require a grand vision and a real leap of faith to take us beyond the current realities. And others… well others like the Dice for Change allow us to take small incremental each day.

Incremental changes quietly and gently alters our thinking, our altitudes, and eventually our behavior. Packaging the concepts for change into a form of game puts it within everyone’s reach.

If interested DiceForChange can be purchased from Amazon.com

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I regularly listen to the Long Now seminars about long term thinking. They are a real antidote to our normal to our normal day to day thinking which mostly focuses on immediate and short term thinking. If you’ve not listened to one before I really recommend that you take a look.

The most recent seminar featured Brewster Kahle founder and librarian of the storied Internet Archive.

All knowledge, to all people, for all time, for free

Universal access to all knowledge, Kahle declared, will be one of humanity’s greatest achievements. We are already well on the way. “We’re building the Library of Alexandria, version 2. We can one-up the Greeks!”

The achievements of the Internet Archive are already quite outstanding:

• The Web – 150 Billion web pages
• Texts – 3,125,761 books and documents
• Audio – 1,047,238 recordings
• Moving Images – 595,903 movies
• e Music Archive – 95,367 concerts

That got me thinking:

What about an Archive of Ideas?

There are many stories of ideas that were before their time – think Leonardo da Vinci

What about all the ideas for products and services that started of as one thing and ended up as something completely different – think Facebook.

Then there’s all the ideas that are just plan dumb – for now!

So how would an archive for ideas work?

• would you embargo ideas until you knew they would work?
• would putting your ideas “out there” motivate you to action?
• Would putting your ideas “out there” stimulate a discussion and help them evolve faster?
• Are we strong enough to accept other people’s critique?

Ideas are partially formed concepts, while texts, pictures, moving pictures, and audio file from the Internet Archive are fully formed and edited. Do we have the courage to share our thinking before it’s fully formed?

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