THE KONGQUEST

Tony Robbins is one crazy guy. He’s got a great amount of charisma and lots of great things to say about human mentality. I’ll be writing some notes up on some of his teachings. Watch this video to get a taste of what he’s about:

There has been a flurry of attention on this little gadget on the blogosphere lately but if you haven’t heard, I’d like to make an early open call to all my friends out there to prepare for a massive SNOWBALL FIGHT this coming winter.  And to be equipped with the right tools to a successful snowball battle, you gotta get the 80 feet Snowball Launcher! This is a sling shot, all man powered, snowball shooter that can get people running up to 80 feet away! Just imagine the maddness this winter with 20 of these bad boys on the street. I can’t contain my excitement for the snow this season! Get ready or get pelted down by my avalanche of snowballs, sucka!

Image via CrunchBase

As adults, we naturally fear the judgement of our peers. When we were kids, we were not embarassed by the things we did or the ideas that we told other people. We could go about and play as we wanted in our imaginary worlds. To exclaim to everyone what exactly was on our minds. Over time, we all learn to be insecure about those fictitious ideas and lose the freedom to take risks.

For most adults, I believe it is difficult to bring back a childish mentality for playfulness and creativity. Tim Brown tells the story of the powerful link between creativity and play. Tim Brown is the CEO of Ideo, which is one of the leading firms on innovation and design. He proposed that creative companies design their workplaces to allow their employees to relax and have fun in efforts to produce great ideas. He says in his talk that those that are best at creative ideas are those who can “unconsciously surrender themselves to the experience.” I found it really interesting that he made the point that friendship is the shortcut to play because of trust. Playfulness leads to creative solutions in an enjoyable way.

In summary, here are the three main bullet points about Play from Tim’s talk at TED:

1. Exploration - lots of ideas - go for quantity

2. Building - think with your hands, learning by doing, prototype

3. Role Play - act it out, working with interaction scripts to test for authenticity and empathy

Play is not anarchy. Play has rules. Players negotiate the rules.

I just finished watching Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s video on TED about flow. What an interesting concept to break down our life activities and be able to categorize what will help us get into that flow state. This in turn helps us reach our ultimate happiness in a structured manner. I found it there was a sharp difference from reading for enjoyment and reading for learning. Leisure reading may require some high skills of understanding and vocabulary but low challenges VS reading to learn, you start from the bottom of no skills and challenge yourself to build skills. I previously had the problem of reading through masses of RSS to gain some insight into my interests but failed on applying what I’ve read to any activities in my life. I’m currently retuning my approach to living a continuously learning and creative lifestyle.

Check out the video:

Here is the flow chart that he presented in the video:

and how it applies to work and life: