Training the Stallion Mind to Unleash Creativity, Part 2 of 2
Are you ready to try unleashing the Stallion within?
Many researchers, theorists, and practitioners throughout history have studied, imagined, and attempted to be more creative.
Here’s Yu-kai’s take. As always, consider that creativity resides within Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback in the Octalysis Framework.
This post continues the discussion from Training the Stallion Mind to Unleash Creativity, Part 1 of 2.
Today’s post is about letting go, and letting the stallion run, and roam, free.
Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
Unleash the Stallion: Take 3-5 Minutes to Let Go
For some of us, taking 3 — much less 5 (gasp!) — minutes to sit still with our eyes closed is a lot to ask.
This is your chance to let the Stallion run free.
If you’ve never tried this — or, if you’re like me, you only try it once or twice per year — you might be surprised by what happens next.
It is likely an entire host of images and thoughts and feelings will present themselves to (or within) your conscious experience.
Maybe some of these will be useful in your creative endeavors. Or maybe not!
It just might be worth your while, even if all I can tempt you with is some unpredictability and curiosity.
Isn’t this just Meditation?
There are many forms of meditation, some of which Yu-kai practiced as a child.
Letting the Stallion run free is not precisely a meditation technique. If anything, it is meditation super-lite.
You don’t need to prepare for it. You just have to sit down, close your eyes, and see what happens.
Want More Creativity?
This technique alone won’t change your life.
But maybe it will become one of your Tiny Habits, which could compound over time as part of a daily routine (or help you finish writing that book!).
For more reading on this subject, I recommend Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention.
Related Reading
- Training the Stallion Mind to Unleash Creativity, Part 1 of 2
- Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback
- The Octalysis Framework for Gamification & Behavioral Design
- What is Gamification?
- How Yu-kai Used Tiny Habits to Write Actionable Gamification
- Books by Yu-kai Chou