Sunday morning. Cereal. Playstation3.  Beating Modern Warfare 2 & Assassin’s Creed 2, back to back.  Yeah, it doesn’t get any better.   So glad to have some free time on my hands.

This weekend, I organized… everything.  My work desk.  My photography gear. My presentations. My finances.  I cleaned my house.  I cleaned my room. I cleaned up my iTunes.  I added a bunch of apps & music to my DROID.  I cleaned up my RSS feeds / Podcasts / Google Reader.   Scheduled all of January 2010 in my calendar.   I ate well. I hit the gym (to work of all that holiday eating. Mmmmm). 


I also reread through a couple Malcolm Gladwell books: Tipping Point and Blink.   Great stuff.  Blink is particularly interesting. It is about the subconscious processes we go through to arrive at ideas.  Supposedly, nature has designed us to make rapid choices automatically for all kinds of reasons:  survival, creativity, socializing, etc. This subliminal cognition can result in prejudices, like racism and sexism, but they are also fundamental to our survival.

Blink stipulates that certain ideas (i.e. epiphanies) can only be reached by not thinking, and allowing your mind to make abstract lateral connections subconsciously.  

Training and putting in serious brain work are important.  It allows you to do a highly orchestrated series of choices, without thinking.  So when its game time, and things have to get done on a set or on a project,  you can let go and do whatever feels right. 

Once things are in motion, the best work comes from forgoing introspection and relying on your reptilian brain.  This approach is universal. It works for athletes, dancers, fighters, models, actors, artists, soldiers, firemen, businessmen, generals, day traders,  gamers, all kinds of professionals really. 

I learned a lot about unlocking this specific kind of creativity when I used to compete in Tekken tournaments.  Even though there are hundreds of thousands of players, each with their individual play styles,  I generally divided all players into 2 categories.   Some players I liked to call “Data players” and other players I called “Feel players”.  Data players are the kind of people that know everything about the game, and everything about their opponent, and with the right training, they could execute and leverage all that “intelligence” to win, a whole lot.  But at the end of the day, I always believed that “Feel players” were better,  faster, and came up with more interesting ideas, because they never had the process of thinking to slow them down.  They would just “be” and “do”, and there’s a lot of strength in that.