2-step inspiration shuffle
1. Put your ipod, mp3 player, or digital music library on shuffle or random mode.
2. Resist hitting the fast-forward button for a whole hour's worth of play.
Easy? Or not so much?
Whatever music you have in your library, it's something you once wanted. Something you were open to. But how many of us skip anything that didn't settle into our top picks the first time?
Why is it so hard to make the most of what you've got, as my copywriting comrade JB urged us to do with brand assets recently?
What does it take to make us revisit the mental playlist of ideas and methods?
How do you make sure you're getting the full value of what you accumulate from so many sources: email, RSS feeds, Favourites, webcasts, roundtables, internal sessions, colleagues, trade press...
Why revisit anything that once caught your imagination, but failed your greatest hits filter the first time?
Because everything changes.
Because what you filed away back then may be useful to you now.
Because maybe some of those filter-failers scared you - or at least unsettled you a bit. That's always worth exploring.
Go random with a little thing or link (already) in your life.
Tell us if you find a hidden gem. Me, I didn't even know I had any KT Tunstall. Now she's top of my workout playlist.
4 Comments
Caspian
So influential is my iPod existence that I re-read books on shuffle now. Current pick is "I'm with the brand". It even has an iPod on the cover.
Noël Ponthieux
But have you read/listened to 'I'm with the Band' by Pamela DesBarres? Excellent groupie memoir. My copy is spine-cracked and dog-eared. Kinda dirty. Like it should be.
My iPod is (still) most useful for the Nike-Plus function that tracks my runs - nothing like that cheerful voice that says 'halfway point' to keep me going...
Glen Drummond
Brilliant observation about musical experience in particular, Noel, and the recontextualization of content in general. Buy stock in metacognition - it's headed up.
Noël Ponthieux
Hi, Glenn! Ooh, the wikipedia entry for metacognition shows it to be a promising investment, indeed, with immediate and long-term payoffs.
I just got back from a leadership workshop that was getting us to metacog (a nice neutral verb for the activity – what do you think?) heavily about team communication and our individual perceptions of what people mean in what they say and do. Part of it also mentioned things that can be used as metacognitive strategies, like the four stages of competence:
1. Unconscious incompetence - you don't realise you don't know how to do something
2. Conscious incompetence - you realise you don't know how to do that thing
3. Conscious competence - you know how to do that thing, but it takes a lot of effort/ concentration
4. Unconscious competence - doing that thing is now basically second nature
I'm wondering if only the first two stages describe metacognition, or if you could say it's the application of this process that is metacognitive...
What's your favourite example or strategy?
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