#ThinkfullyHabit: Shuffle it
Just like the shuffle button throws up interesting and unexpected discoveries on your playlist, shuffling and organising your thoughts and ideas can do the same. If you’ve got a bunch of options and ideas then sorting and rearranging them in different ways can help you see things afresh; revealing patterns not yet seen.
“What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. ”
WHY?
Finding the pattern is exactly what Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev went about doing in 1869 when he tried to make sense of all known chemical elements. At the time, although many elements had been identified (63 to be precise), they were yet to be organised in any meaningful way. Mendeleev set out to change that.
Mendeleev is perhaps best known for getting to this change by falling asleep and having a dream of swirling ingredients snapping together and forming into a logical matrix. This formed the basis of the periodic table – an amazing breakthrough. However, what is less well known is the strategy he used to get to that point.
Mendeleev wrote down each of the 63 chemical elements on a separate card, along with their key properties. On February 17, 1869, he set about organising the elements using these cards. He carried them around with him for the next three days and continually shuffled, arranged and rearranged them into various sequences, like a game of solitaire. He was convinced there must be a pattern.
Through this card shuffling he would certainly have tried arranging the elements by atomic weight and by recurring chemical properties. There is little doubt that this playful strategy is what allowed his unconscious mind to go on to complete the pattern in his sleep and combine these dimensions together in matrix form; making what would become the final periodic table.
If shuffling cards can help explain known elements, think what else this technique could be helpful for. Getting bitesized ideas down onto cards is one of the simplest ways to play around and see how they fit together. Shuffling, grouping, re-arranging and sorting is a great way to spot new patterns and connections. Why not try it - periodically.