COACHING THE COACHES
PART 12
by Jon Rappoport
Copyright © 2011 by Jon Rappoport
A general rule of imagination is: it’s easier to cut back from Big than expand from Little.
If a designer is working on a radically new automobile design, his chance of success is increased if he starts out with his most extreme version of what that car could look like, as opposed to drawing the current model and then adding features that would make it unique.
He can take his most extreme version and scale it back if he needs to. Adding new wrinkles to the old model is usually a flop.
This is rarely understood.
People like to think in terms of “incremental imagination.” That’s like saying, “Can I parachute out of this plane a little bit?”
Take the leap.
A client of mine, an architect, was commissioned to design a greenhouse on a large estate. The family wanted “something different.” Of course, the architect didn’t know what that was. He thought his best approach was to start with conventional drawings and add “interesting features.”
He tried that. The family wasn’t impressed.
So I assigned him the following: make five drawings of greenhouses that are so absurd, so crazy that no one would ever want them on their property, even at the point of a gun.
He struggled, but he did present me with the sketches. I could tell he wasn’t happy. So I told him to do five more.
This time it worked. In the process of drawing these five in the most bizarre ways he could imagine, he found “a few great ideas”popping into his head. He used those, and from scratch he came up with a quite beautiful and original design. The family took one look at it and approved it on the spot.
Another client of mine was a frustrated carpenter. A jack-of-all trades type. Lately, he was having trouble making a living, and he felt stifled in his work. He’d been in the profession 15 years, and it didn’t seem to interest him anymore.
We did some of the imagination exercises I’ve described in these articles, and one day he told me he had a new idea. What he really wanted to do was organize and lead tours to unusual out-of-the-way places, all over the world.
He began making notes and plans on how he would accomplish this. Meanwhile, we continued working together.
A month or so later, he told me he’d scrapped the tour idea, because something else had come up. Opening a restaurant. He’d always loved cooking, especially Middle Eastern food.
A week later, the restaurant idea was gone. He wanted to go back to school and get a degree in engineering.
I told him to make a long list of careers that didn’t exist.
He came up with quite an array of professions, from squirrel grooming, to building mile-high towers of snow, to cataloging stowaways on space cruisers, to setting up a publicly traded company that would advise politicians on how to embezzle campaign funds. There were more than a hundred professions on the list.
He told me he felt better about his future, although he had no idea why.
A week later, he said, for the first time in his life he felt he could do anything. He’d originally gone into carpentry because he was good at it. He’d never really chosen it with any enthusiasm.
We did a a dialogue, in which the two roles were: “soul on an astral plane,” and “salesman for a new life on Earth.” Part of the salesman’s job was to go over possible career choices. This morphed into “man who’d died in a small plane crash” and “extra-terrestrial guide in Limbo.” We each played both roles.
That night, he called to say he was going away to his cabin for a week.
When he came back, he looked quite refreshed, and not at all frustrated.
“The work we’ve been doing,” he said. “It’s been like peeling layers of an onion.” He laughed. “But not consecutive layers. I’ve been jumping around.”
He told me he’d come up with the most obvious answer to his problem. He didn’t understand why he hadn’t seen it sooner. He proceeded to talk about his childhood, when his stepfather had taken him on several long trips in his boat. He’d never felt freer than on those excursions.
So in the following few months, the carpenter found a partner, and they leased a large space in an industrial district, and he began building boats.
He calls it “the dream I never knew I had.”
I said, “So maybe the dream was hiding somewhere in your imagination.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But all those years I was doing routine carpentry, my imagination was dead.”
“But now you brought it back from the dead.”
He looked at me.
“So that’s what you were doing.”
“It works.”
“How did you know it would?” he said.
“I believe in imagination. And I’ve got a list of all the times it has worked.”
Asking a person what he wants is really asking what he wants to create.
And asking that to a person who professes to have no clue about his own imagination is far different from asking it to a person who can live through and by imagination.
Suppose the universe is there to test our imaginations? It’s like walking into a museum full of paintings. Are you inspired to paint, or do you just want to keep looking at the pictures forever? The universe is a work of art. We can keep looking at it and analyzing it forever, or we can imagine new realities and invent them.
Jon Rappoport
A former candidate for a US Congressional seat in California, Jon has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years. He has written articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. The author of The Ownership of All Life, Jon has maintained a consulting practice for the past 15 years. He has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, and creativity to audiences around the world.