When I was younger, long before I read Stephen King’s IT, I remember holding my mums hand (I must have been five) and walking through a sun dappled wood. I was patiently explaining how a race of small people lived in the drains under the roads, a whole universe existing below foot.
As grew older I hungrily read a vast forest of books, played, as well as wrote, computer games (this is back in the day when most things were text based) and enjoyed hours of fun with my friends in worlds created through Dungeons and Dragons roleplay.
Lots of imagination required
As I grew older still I migrated to university and my whole aspect shifted. I still read, but not in any way as much as before. I enjoyed socialising with the friends’ who build up around you as you discovered your freedom and more of yourself.
This is not meant to be a potted biography, so I’ll fast forward a bit more, I entered the world of work and started to earn my daily bread. I was one of the lucky ones who found something which I enjoyed (in as much as you can enjoy your first job).
I still read, I still played computer games, mostly as a means of escapism and to unwind an otherwise buzzing mind.
It wasn’t until sometime later that I realised through no design I’d been exercising one of the primary muscles that drives personal and social growth. Imagination.
Imagination is something which we have in giant buckets as children, it entertains us and paints worlds on top of the world we live in. As we grow older our imagination begins to wane, in-fact day dreaming is seen as childish and we’re conditioned to engage with the real world around us. This is just what happened to me, my feet became more rooted to the ground and my imagination, whilst still active, started to atrophy.
If you’re lucky, what you’ll learn later is that imagination, day dreaming and just dreaming can be a wonderful way to stay happy, to innovate, to motivate yourself, in fact there’s not a lot of things you can’t do with imagination. Most entrepreneurs used their imagination to see something which no-one had yet envisioned. They made a leap, either big or small, to create something which didn’t exist before. How can you do that without imagination?
It’s been said that happy people live in the moment. I propose that happy, motivated people live with one foot in the moment and one boot place in the future, imagining the next step, the next dream, the next place to visit, or taking people along the way to visit with you. Anticipation, the sense of possibility and the golden hues of things yet to happen drives us forwards.
I’m not saying to be successful you need to feed your imagination, to be an innovator, to be successful you need lots of different things (in fact so many different things that no formula has ever been written down which guarantees success). What I’m saying is that if you want to be an entrepreneur you might want to try working your imagination. I don’t mean being consumed in a good TV show or engrossing film, sure these are a trip in your imagination, but they’re pretty insignificant imagination exercises. Perhaps similar to lifting a couple of grains of sugar and expecting to grow giant muscles’ (largely because the imagination has been done by other people and you’re simply consuming it; there’s little room for you to embellish), perhaps a better analogy is like cooking a microwave meal rather than making something from scratch. You’re not going to get better by eating someone else’s meal.
It’s going to be a real personal choice how to get your imagination going; painting, writing, reading, day dreaming, imagineering, there’s a whole gamut of options open to you. The key thing is, if you want to make a leap forward, you need to strengthen your jumping legs.
I would also suggest that this is not something which happens overnight, or through a forceful step-by-step development process. It might be a handy little tool in your personal development tool box though. You might be thinking of solving a problem, even something mundane and then completely imagine what the end result might be like. Once you have the end goal, you can work backwards and figure out how to get there.
It might be of no use to you what-so-ever, but along the way, in trying to ignite the flames of your imagination, you’ll probably have spent a few enjoyable moments stepping outside of yourself.
Article by: Phil Bird
Entrepreneur and innovator of market places, the founder of www.perfectchannel.com
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