Forgettery

No it’s not a actual word.

We need to make sure we don’t lose the ability to forget what we sometimes learn. Our minds are sponges through out the day and tend to pick up like Bounty paper towels everything it comes into contact with. Most of the time they are all ready-made assumptions. Even worse, we lack the drive to to ask the questions that can lead out thinking to new ideas.

An incredible novelist Henry Miller drops it like this:

My ‘forgettery’ has been just as important to my success as my memory.

When we can master forgetting what we know, at just the right time, we can own new insight we couldn’t before we forgot.

Here’s a great exercise I came across using paper airplanes to make the illustration.

If you gave a group of people or a team sheets of paper to make airplanes with the goal of getting the most sheets to fly across the line at the back of a room, how would they do it? The winning group or team being the one that can get the most across line are probably thinking fold each piece of paper into different airplane versions and just toss. No one will probably forget about the conventional ways to “fly” a piece of paper across the line. However, if you can forget that conventional way by balling it up and just making the balled up piece of paper “fly” over the line, your group or team would win hands down.

We made assumptions in that exercise of what a paper airplane is suppose to look like. I’m sure the team that figures out balling up the paper for the win probably had the same assumptions of everyone else. What was different? They choose to forget them and try something unconventional.

Here’s some questions you can reflect on and share that will help you forget convention:

What conventional wisdom are you relying to much on? Can you break it?

What would happens if you forgot the obvious answers that first hit your mind and looked at different ones?

What assumptions about your current goals for 2018 can you let go of?

Practicing forgettery is a great skill to use as you start this new year off facing probably the same goals we didn’t accomplish the year before. You need to defy conventional thinking in your approaches. Make it so simple and hand to the face obvious. Kind of like balling up a piece a paper and giving it a toss.

✌🏻 Shawn