10 minute Challenge to unlock your imagination

I have a challenge for you. No matter where you happen to be reading this blog or my book, be it in your home, your office, in a restaurant, a garden, on an airplane, or somewhere else, take a quick look around you. Absorb the various mundane things that you see. Now try to fabricate a game or a sport using them as props. These are all things you see every day in the same way and don’t give much thought to. But now let your imagination take over and see them as objects of fun.

Look to my story from last week as your guide. Go!

How did you do? How long did it take you to come up with something? Moreover, do you think that your game would be fun to try? Did you find the exploratory process of this exercise difficult? Did you find it meaningful? In essence, this simple exercise represents exactly the thinking process that we need to reclaim, that came so naturally when we were children. I can reposition the challenge this way: take a look at the familiar resources of your business or the characteristics of your personal environment that surround you. Now think of new applications, new combinations, new angles that would allow you to overstep perceived limitations of your business or your environment in a way that provides new levels of enrichment. By doing so, nothing has changed, except your perspective and the boundary lines of your imagination. Which in turn serves to unlock meaningful new possibilities.

Learn more about overstepping perceived limitations in your business and personal life in my book Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life.