The Seventh Sense

How Flashes of Insight Change Your Life

William Duggan

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231539432
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Flashes of insight—the "Eureka!" moments that produce new and useful ideas in a single thought—are behind some of the world's most creative and practical innovations. This book shows how to cultivate more and better flashes of insight by harnessing the science and practice of the "seventh sense."

Drawing from psychology, neuroscience, Asian philosophy, and military strategy, William Duggan illustrates the power of the seventh sense to help readers aspire to and achieve more in their personal and professional lives. His examples include Gandhi, Joan of Arc, Starbucks founder Howard Shultz, and executives and students he has taught in his classes. His book presents specific steps in the form of three practical tools to help prepare the mind, see and seize opportunity, and follow through on one's resolution. Based on Duggan's perennially popular Columbia Business School course, this book teaches the mental skills and discipline that power the seventh sense.

1

Introduction

Ideas for Life

IT GOES BY MANY NAMES:

A flash of insight.

The Eureka moment.

A spark of genius.

The big “Aha!”

An epiphany.

It’s the moment when a new idea forms in your head, and you suddenly see a way to accomplish something meaningful in your life. All the great minds, all the great leaders, all the great achievers have had at least one of these moments.

And you can too.

That’s because in recent years, thanks to the modern science of the brain, we know enough now about flashes of insight to take full advantage of this mysterious power of the human mind.

That’s what this book is about.

Here I call it the “seventh sense.” You know about your five senses—smell, taste, touch, sight, and hearing. Scientists have studied them for hundreds of years. What you might not realize is that your five senses are mental abilities. A sensation starts at your nose, your tongue, your skin, your eye, or your ear, but then nerve cells connect it to your brain, and that’s when it becomes a “sense.” Your nose takes in an odor, and your brain turns it into the smell of warm rain. Your tongue feels a tang, and your brain turns it into the taste of lime. Your ear hears a sound, and your brain makes it birdsong.

The key way your brain turns sensation into sense is through memory. Modern neuroscience has revealed the importance of memory in how humans make sense of the world—starting with your five basic senses. You recognize the smell of a rose because you’ve smelled it before. It’s in your memory. If you smell an odor and can’t tell what it is, that’s because it’s not in your memory: you can’t make sense of the sensation. If you smell something and think it’s familiar but can’t place it, your brain searches your memory to identify what it is.

Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize in 2000 for his pioneering work on how the brain learns and remembers. He says in his Nobel speech:

For me, learning and memory have proven to be endlessly fascinating mental processes because they address one of the fundamental features of human activity: our ability to acquire new ideas from experience and to retain these ideas in memory. In fact, most of the ideas we have about the world and our civilization we have learned so that we are who we are in good measure because of what we have learned and what we remember.

Learning and memory play a key role in the sixth sense too. The most common name for this sense is “intuition.” You make a snap judgment, or you get a feeling about something because you’ve seen it before in some other situation—even if you can’t quite recall what exactly that situation was. Herbert Simon won the Nobel Prize in 1978 for his work on intuition and memory, and today Gary Klein is one of the field’s leading scholars. Malcolm Gladwell’s popular book Blink presented recent research on the power and pitfalls of the sixth sense.

Think firefighters, emergency room nurses, or soldiers in battle. They all make quick decisions that repeat in some way what they’ve done before. They all have a strong sixth sense. As you get better and faster each time you do some complex task, that builds up your sixth sense. If you’ve ever mastered a musical instrument or any kind of sport, you know what it’s like to have a sixth sense. Or if you walk into a meeting and know exactly what’s going on, before anyone explains it—that’s your sixth sense in action. It’s a form of déjà vu. You’ve seen some version of the situation before, and your brain calls it up from your personal memory.

That’s the power of the sixth sense. But there’s one situation where it doesn’t work at all, and can actually lead to you make the wrong decisions: when you think you’re seeing the same situation, but you’re not. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow is full of clever experiments that made even experts jump to the wrong conclusions. Their sixth sense failed them. You can probably recall times yourself when your intuition was wrong—when you followed your gut and it turned out to be a mistake. That’s because you recognized something familiar, but the rest of the situation was new. Your intuition only works when you encounter something very similar to what you’ve seen before. If the situation is new, your sixth sense isn’t enough.

For a new situation, you need a new idea. And your sixth sense cannot give it to you. Your intuition gives you the same idea, again, faster and better with each repetition. For new situations, for new ideas, you need something else.

You need the seventh sense.

The seventh sense is the mechanism of the human mind that produces new ideas. It’s the epiphany, the flash of insight, the Eureka moment—in the form of an idea you never had before. And in its highest, rarest form, it’s an idea that no one else had before either. The seventh sense is how new ideas are born. And not just new ideas, but useful ideas. Human achievement advances through flashes of insight that come from the seventh sense.

Some new ideas lead to major changes in how the world works, but the majority of them just change the world of one person. Behind the scenes, lost to history, are millions of new and useful ideas that solve individual problems of life or work. A painful family or romantic relationship might call for a new and useful idea to heal it, and to solve that problem you need the seventh sense. Or a project gets bogged down at work, and you need a new idea to save it. These personal creative ideas, for work or life, are just as important for advancing human achievement and the quality of our lives as great innovations like electric light or the personal computer. And they happen in your brain in exactly the same way too. All of them come from the seventh sense.

Yet as you might guess, you cannot will an epiphany to happen. You can’t squeeze it out of your brain like toothpaste from a tube. It just comes to you, and you suddenly see it. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t improve your seventh sense and improve your likelihood of these “aha” moments. The epiphany itself is just one of four steps that together make up the seventh sense. Two other steps come before the epiphany, to prime your mind to allow the flash of insight to happen. The fourth step comes after, to help ensure that you put the flash to good use. While the flash of insight may be spontaneous, these other three steps are within your control. With practice, you can improve your seventh sense, and learn to make the most of it. That’s what this book is about.

In chapter 6 I’ll tell you how I found out about the seventh sense some ten years ago. Since then I’ve taught what it is and how best to use it to thousands of students in my classes at Columbia Business School and at professional workshops around the world. I’ve written before about how professionals and organizations can use it to come up with new business ideas. In this book I explain how to use it in your personal life. My students asked me to write it. They wanted it for themselves, to refer back to as they applied what they learned in class to their lives after graduation. And they wanted to give it to family and friends for them to learn too. You will hear more about some of these students and see some of their work in the chapters to come.

One thing I quickly found out from teaching the ideas in this book is that your personal life includes your work life. In a typical month, you spend more of your waking time working than with your family and friends, or alone. And your thoughts about your work include its personal side: for example, how to fulfill your interests and passions at your current job, whether to look for a different job, how to deal with difficult people at work, or how much time and thought to devote to work versus the other parts of your life. And new ideas in your work are personal too: innovation is always a risk, and takes personal commitment on the part of the innovator. So having new ideas at work, and deciding whether or not to commit to them, is part of personal strategy too.

My main goal is to show you how to develop your seventh sense to create new and useful ideas for changing something about your life. As you might guess, that turns out to be very different from improving your sixth sense. To build up your sixth sense, you pick the activity you want to learn and then practice, practice, practice. Each time you do it, your sixth sense grows. But the sixth sense doesn’t travel. If you have a sixth sense about one thing, such as playing the guitar, that doesn’t help your sixth sense about something else, such as learning French. You can only improve your sixth sense activity by activity. You cannot improve your sixth sense in general.

The seventh sense, on the other hand, is a general skill. You can improve your ability to have new ideas of any kind. You can learn the right mental steps to prepare your brain for a flash of insight, and you can learn how to follow through after it happens. You cannot predict what the epiphany will be—after all, it’s a new idea—or when it will come. And each epiphany will be different. The sixth sense helps you do the same thing better and better, while the seventh sense gives you something new. Asking your sixth sense to give you a new idea is like asking a horse to fly. The sixth sense can do many great things, but an epiphany is not one of them.

The first half of this book shows you how the seventh sense works. You will learn the science behind it, how it differs from your other mental abilities, and the details of the four steps that make it up. The second half of the book gives you a set of practical tools and exercises that lead you through the discovery of your own seventh sense, help you improve it, and show where you can use it best for new ideas in your life. And along the way, you’ll see examples of great innovators and leaders who got their ideas through the seventh sense. By seeing the seventh sense in them, you can see it in yourself.

Smell, taste, touch, sight, and hearing: these five senses give you ordinary ideas, based on common sensations that other people have too. The sixth sense—intuition—gives you good ideas based on your own personal experience. The seventh sense gives you new ideas that go beyond what you’ve ever known or thought before. It’s how you see something new, do something new, and sometimes even become someone new.

In the end, I hope this book can help you find the answer to one of the most important questions you can ever ask:

“What should I do with my life?”

We’ve all known times when the honest answer is: “I have no idea!”

That’s when you need the seventh sense. It gives you that idea.

2

Find Your Dream

An Italian Epiphany

IT STARTS OUT AS AN ordinary business trip to a trade show for housewares. Nothing special, except for the location: Milan, Italy. Of course you jump at the chance to go.

Your name is Howard Schultz, and the year is 1983. You’re thirty years old. It’s your first trip to Italy. You work for a coffee company named Starbucks, in Seattle, Washington. Starbucks has six stores around the city, and they all sell high-quality coffee beans for customers to make coffee back home. A customer comes in and scoops the coffee beans from a bin to fill a brown paper bag. Some customers grind the beans there in the store, and some have a grinder at home.

On the plane to Milan, if you’re thinking about your job at all, your mind is on the trade show ahead: how to fix up the Starbucks stores with the latest and best equipment. But there are lots of other things in the back of your mind that have nothing to do with your trip. For example, you know the difference between Robusta and Arabica coffee. Robusta beans come from hot tropical lowlands, like Brazil or the Ivory Coast, while Arabica beans come from cool tropical highlands, like Guatemala, Ethiopia, or Java. Robusta is much cheaper than Arabica and much more common in America. You find Robusta at roadside diners and in the cans of ground coffee in supermarkets. Robusta beans are bitter, so you usually drink the coffee weak. Arabica, on the other hand, is not bitter, so you can drink it stronger, and that means each cup has much more flavor. Starbucks sells Arabica only. The only way to make excellent coffee at home is to buy Arabica beans from a store like Starbucks. But that kind of store is rare. With only six locations, Starbucks is the biggest Arabica chain in all the United States.

Your plane lands in Milan. The trade show is downtown, and so is your hotel. You arrive late, get a good night’s sleep, and the next morning you walk to the trade show. The streets of downtown Milan are a treat, lined with beautiful old buildings and lively with everyone walking to work. You notice a coffee bar. You can’t resist it. You go inside.

Right away, you love it. You can smell the coffee—smooth Arabica. Italians stand at the bar with their cups, chatting to each other and with the barista behind the counter working the espresso machine. You see cappuccino, regular coffee, caffè latte. You order an espresso yourself. Heavenly.

You finish your coffee and continue on to the trade show. You see another coffee bar on the same block, and another at the corner. Then another on the next block down. They’re all busy, filled with Italians chatting away over their morning coffee. You’ve never seen anything like it.

In Schultz’s own words:

My mind started churning.

You go to the trade show, and at the end of the day you walk back to your hotel. You stop in at another coffee bar. You order another espresso. As you sip it, you take in the scene around you. And then:

I had a revelation: Starbucks had missed the point—completely missed it. This is so powerful. … It was like an epiphany. It was so immediate and physical that I was shaking. It seemed so obvious. Starbucks sold great coffee beans, but we didn’t serve coffee by the cup. … If we could re-create in America the authentic Italian coffee bar culture, it might resonate with other Americans the way it did with me. Starbucks could be a...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Ideas for Life
• 2. Find Your Dream: An Italian Epiphany
• 3. Examples from History: Indian Men and English Women
• 4. Presence of Mind: Your City of Light
• 5. Flash of Insight: Magical Science
• 6. Resolution: The Art of Passion
• 7. Free Your Mind: From Stress to Strategy
• 8. Personal Strategy Map: In Search of Passion
• 9. Idea Networking: In Search of Opportunity
• 10. Conclusion: Your Seventh Sense
• Appendix A: Seventh Sense Toolkit
• Appendix B: Personal Strategy Maps
• Bibliography
• Index