#ThinkfullyHabit: Beam away
How are you feeling? It turns out that your mood could be the difference between solving a problem, or not.
One evening, single parent Jerry Swartz simply wanted to occupy and entertain his three children so he brought home a laser pointer to show them. He started by shining the light onto different objects in the house and eventually started to shine the pointer onto moving objects to keep them engaged. They were simply relaxed, happy and everyone was in a good mood. Then he recounts that unexpectedly, “I knew I had it.” He suddenly realised that he’d hit on an idea his company had been trying to solve - how to miniaturise and mobilise scanners that retailers used to read barcodes. Up until that point scanners were large devices built into checkout counters, with no flexibility.
“Your best ideas, those eureka moments that turn the world upside down, seldom come when you’re juggling emails, rushing to meet the 5pm deadline or straining to make your voice heard in a high-stress meeting. They come when you’re walking the dog, soaking in the bath or swinging in a hammock.”
WHY?
Cognitive Psychologist Adam Anderson identified that being in a positive mood broadens your attention and thinking, whilst a negative mood does the exact opposite. This broader view is exactly what’s needed to solve problems because it helps you see the bigger picture and allows you to pull together looser ideas that would otherwise be discarded if your focus was narrower. When happy, people tend to see more connections and commonalities between things. When unhappy, you just don’t.
It’s therefore no coincidence that Jerry Swartz’s famous idea didn’t happen at work but while at home in the evening entertaining his kids, when everyone was enjoying themselves and he was not trying to solve the problem of how to make large fixed scanners, small and portable. It was in this situation he realised that the beam of light from the laser could move and follow the object. This was the trigger that led to the development of the first hand-held laser scanner, now used everywhere.
If you find yourself stuck on a problem and feel your brow furrow and your face frown, perhaps just knowing that it’s less likely to be the moment you solve the problem will be enough to encourage you to step back and do something else that will make you happier for a while. You never know, having that justification and permission may be just enough to induce a little beam of a smile.