If You Don't Know What Creative Emulation Is, How Are You Solving Your Challenges?

Can you imagine having a multi-talented team of experts at your call, working on solving your biggest problems? Depending on what you are doing, you can have exactly just that, well not exactly…It might just be better.

You probably heard that “Success Leaves Clues?” Have you asked yourself what this means? Most people haven’t; it’s a shame because that probably leaves out three quarters worth of what we already know works. It’s a given, at some point someone else, at some point in time is having, or has had to solve the same problems, or take advantage of same opportunities that you’re facing.

Most people get stuck trying to find a right solution; apart from the fact that seldom there’s a right or wrong solution, doesn’t it make sense to find out how others have faced up to these challenges. If you’re looking at similar problems, chances are that the solutions will be similar as well.

How would someone else view your situation? How would Ben Franklin approach your problem? What would Albert Einstein come up with? If you pay enough attention, ask enough questions, and you’re willing to explore and open your mind, you can find the footsteps that success has left.

The point of the exercise is in forcing yourself to see different points of view, more possibilities and other perspectives. “No man is an island” the adage goes; forgetting this simple rule is to limit yourself to having a one track mind.

You can pick and choose which solutions to adopt, how to change them to your needs, and whether or not they work for you. Life is a big experiment, and our advantage lies in being aware of what these may be so that we can adapt them to our own uses.

There’s always something new to learn about your problem or opportunity, from someone who has already taken the time to think about, reflect and take action on something similar than what you’re now facing. Have you realized that?

The essence of creative emulation is to step away from linear thinking. There are as many ways to skin a cat as there grains of sand. What it comes down to is, in being successful at having a multi-perspective view of things.

It should not be too hard these days. There’s hoards of information on the Internet, on how other people are doing things. The challenge here involves in discerning between the many options that are available (which seems to be giving us a whole new set of problems, but we’ll get into that later).

Although we should always test things out, this approach is effective in giving us an amplitude of vision which strategically makes better sense in the long run.

It’s a different way of viewing and thinking about things. It’s taking advantage of what everybody sees about something and being able to draw a solution from that. Perhaps Erwin Schrodinger says it best: “The task is…not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.”

And that’s the challenging part; we’re so used to having so many options that the effect is that we’re numb and our attention spans have shrunk to the size of an acorn. Not that we’re unable to pay attention, although many would argue that we are, we just aren’t taught how to regain focus.

Here’s another trait that we can creatively emulate; ask yourself, “Which person, that I admire, seems to be able to focus attentively in a way that I’m looking for?”, “What does that person do?” “Can I learn to do what he/she is doing?” The possibilities are that you will be able to emulate that behavior, and the results will probably fall in line with those that you were looking for in the first place. It’s a matter of looking up, and into what you may to close to, to see.

I remember learning a profound lesson from a master in creative emulation…he’s a 5 year old. Like noted psychologist Howard Gardner points out: “ When we are young, our minds change with great ease. We pick up information with facility and retain it readily; we learn foreign languages rapidly and pick up accents accurately; and our understanding of the world alters quickly as well.” Children are seldom afraid to try on other approaches; the downside is that when we grow up, we become attached to our own particular point of view, and we’re hard pushed to change it voluntarily.

It’s far more productive to remain open, flexible, and curious about how we solve our challenges. Properly applied, creative emulation can allow us to do just that…give us a much broader view of things.