When I was a kid, I was sitting in my mothers old Ford Pinto at a gas station waiting for her to fill up the car. I found a yellow bottle under the seat – it looked promising so I took a sip. Little did my 5 year old self know, it was window washing fluid. Fast forward, I wound up at the hospital and had to have my stomach pumped. My idiot self thought it would be a good idea to drink poison. But I didn’t know any better.
Reductive thinking is poison
Reductiveness during creative brainstorming, ideation, green housing ideas and collaboration is a poison to finding the best solution.
The best and most brilliant solutions are not found in the notion of “we can’t do that” but in the continuation of thinking “yes, and..” until you reach the dead end of all possible positive thinking to land in the place where the most creative thoughts exist.
Reductive thinking and the reductive approach is lazy. Reductiveness is for primitive minds.
- Alleviate your reductiveness
- Meditate
- Walk
- Listen or play music
- Have conversations with others.
- Take breaks from your work.
- Start seeing the world through a practical lens of how to make every situation around you better.
- Do not let the constraints of time or money choke out your ability to create and lead you down a reductive path – winners always find a way and successful people don’t blame lack of resources, instead they find resourcefulness in making things work no matter what.
The opposite of reductive isn’t having your head in the clouds and being blind to reality. It’s about seeing how things can be improved through a lens of positivity. The world wasn’t built by reductive thinkers, but built by those who see light at the end of every tunnel and fight to get there no matter what.