The Power of Forgetting by Mike Byster Read Free Book Online Page A

who has ever walked into your store (and thus keep them coming back). Or always adapting quickly to changes in your life that threaten your livelihood and ability to make a living.
    Maybe you made a living fixing cameras over the past thirty years, but not the digital ones that now dominate the market. You might need to go back to school, become an apprentice, or take other steps to acquire a totally new skill set that will pay your bills.
    In a world where it’s increasingly difficult to find and maintain a good job, having an advantage and being able to reinvent yourself whenever necessary becomes all the more critical. Whether you like it or not, most everything in life is a competition. And it goes without saying that we need productive thinkers now more than ever. The good news, though, is that I promise to make this fun!

The Power of Mental Habits
    It’s All About Patterns!
    I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn
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    — ALBERT EINSTEIN
    When innovative people with clever minds are asked for their secrets to success, they often talk about the mental habits they keep. These include the ways in which they look at what’s in front of them to generate new ideas and promote creativity. In addition to the obvious traits that help our imaginations, such as asking questions (e.g., What if? Why? How?) and performing experiments, an overarching theme in all things related to mental acuity is simply the ability to establish habits that help us to organize our thoughts and make breathing room for learning new things, which also entails a great deal of forgetting. Habits, after all, are nothing more than activities that we do repeatedly and that follow a certain pattern or rhythm. And habits are patterns of thought; the ones we keep in our thinking processes have everything to do withwhether or not we can remember critical information, forget what’s not important, tap creative areas in our brains, and free up mental energy to engage in complex thinking that requires a lot of focus and concentration.
    This chapter is going to take you on what I hope will be a provocative tour of how habits relate to the brain’s capacity and how we can use certain mental habits not only to sharpen our minds, and especially our memories, but also to look at things from totally different perspectives that can inspire insight, help us find new and better solutions to everyday problems, and spur innovative ideas. Our mental habits also play into our ability to forget when appropriate and maintain a clear, clutter-free brain ready to take on more. And at the heart of this lesson is an understanding of how patterns share a powerful relationship with habits.

WHAT’S IN A PATTERN?
    First things first: What exactly is a pattern? It’s simply a type of theme of recurring events or objects. Patterns exist everywhere we look. They are in numbers, in words, and even in nature. If you pick up any
National Geographic
magazine, for example, you’ll see the most spectacular photographs of patterns found in animals, landscapes, flowers, stars, sand, and so on. Most of us don’t notice patterns unless they scream out to us (as they do from a photograph) or we’re challenged to find them or, like me, we become addicted to identifying patterns in everything.
    If I were to ask you to give me an example of a pattern, you’d probably name one of those found visually in decorations, like stripes, zigzags, or polka dots, or on your bedroom’s wallpaper, your favorite argyle socks, or your pinstripedsuit. Or perhaps you’d think of the patterns heard in the rhythms and beats of a song, the striations that make up rock formations, the designs seen in architecture, the flow of traffic and signaling of streetlights, the predictable styles that are emblematic of certain car manufacturers, or the motifs found in artworks—you can detect patterns, for instance, in Monet’s works, as well as in Van Gogh’s and