Make choices!

If I remember correctly, one of Jack Canfield’s tips in his book, The Success Principles is about making choices.  The point, I think, was to get in the habit of making choices rather than just going along with things.  If somebody asked you where you wanted to eat, Canfield suggested that you make a choice, advance an opinion, pick a restaurant rather than say, “I don’t care.”

Obviously, there will be times when you really don’t care where you eat.  You have more important things on your mind.  But making choices in small things helps you to make choices in big things.  You may remember that I’ve used this quote before from Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love.

Will you be a poet, or a scholar?
                I don’t mind.
Oh, it helps to mind.  Life is in the minding.

“Life is in the minding.”

I think, too, that creativity is in the minding.

This is a tip for me, especially, more, even, than you, because I think I am often guilty of trying to find the easiest way rather than the most creative.  But I am going to start asking myself more often if there is a more interesting way to do something.  Can I take a little more effort and arrange this furniture in a more pleasing pattern?  Is there something interesting I can do with these plants?  Other than stick them in the ground and hope that they grow?  What do I really want my new kitchen to look like?  How should it operate?  What gadgets are useful?  Or fun?

This is going to be a hard tip for me to follow.  I want things done easily.  Fast.  Inexpensively.

Creativity is, often, the opposite of all that.

I suspect, though, that practice helps.

And to that end, I’m going to see if I can’t do something interesting with my shoelaces.

Why don’t you take a look at that link, too?  And, when next we meet, we’ll compare patterns!