Think Bigger to Become Greater

June 10, 2009 by Milton Kamwendo
Filed under: Unleashing Greatness 

In his book, The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump said: “I like thinking big. I always have. To me it’s very simple: if you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big. Most people think small, because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning. And that gives people like me a great advantage.” Indeed there is great advantage in thinking big. The sky is always big enough for any bird to fly, but some birds are always too scared to fly higher or   think bigger.

Question your thinking
The questions we ask are shaped by the mould of our thinking. We can ask disempowering, defeat questions. But we can also learn to ask bold empowering, liberating questions. The internal questions that we hold affect our attitudes. We could ask questions that prosecute and sentence us to a life of bondage, mediocrity and poverty. An example of enslaving questions include: “Why am I stupid? Why don’t I ever do right? Why does everyone hate me? Who is to blame?” We can also choose to be creators and ask empowering questions. Questions like: “How can I change my situation? How can I deliver more value? How can I make a difference in this situation?  Deliberately we have to move our thinking from being prosecutors to being creators. We must learn from the past but refuse to be imprisoned by it.

Think New Possibilities
There are no hopeless situations in life. Simply put, some people have resigned from thinking and have given up on their situation. Every challenge in life is pregnant with new possibilities, if we are willing to think creatively. We can delegate many things but we must never delegate our own thinking. That is why it is so important for us to create time and space for thinking in our busy schedule. Acting without thinking is suicide and thinking without acting is laziness.

Thinking Modes
We can choose to think in one, two or three-dimensional modes. In the one dimensional mode we just look at our situation as it. The challenge with one dimensional thinking is that it can get us locked into our current reality. It is a great tragedy to think that the whole world revolves around us. While one-dimensional thinking is good, its major pitfall is that it locks us into the usual and the familiar. Level one problems always call for a thinking level that is at least a step higher.

In two dimensional thinking we begin to look for references from elsewhere. We try and adapt what has worked elsewhere to our situation and reality. Every situation always has multiple realities. This is the whole notion of learning from experience – the experience does not always have to be ours. We can learn from other people’s experiences. Very few situations are new in the earth, especially in this knowledge age. Our failure to learn is simple an attitude problem but never an informational one. The challenge with two-dimensional thinking is that we can be limited by other people’s experiences and stifle innovation. This leads us to explore three dimensional thinking.

In three dimensional thinking we choose to adapt references from different spheres and then transpose them to our situation. Most inventions are born through three dimensional thinking. In looking at a customer service problem we could start looking at other systems in life which “serve”, for instance we could look at the blood circulation system and look at how it works then try and adapt what we learn to our environment. By all means we must always think – which ever way we do it.

Words Affect Thinking
Our words are the packages of our thoughts. Our thoughts are also affected by the words that we repeatedly here. To think bigger we have to start changing the words that we hear. The more we spend time with people who are negative, who kill ideas and only think historically the less we are able to progress. Negative disempowering words poison attitudes. Bright, cheerful words always inspire and encourage.

To think bigger we have to start believing big. We have to look at what we have and stop self-depreciating ourselves. The size of our success is not determined by the size of our brains but the size of our thinking and believing. In as much as we are so diligent in weeding our gardens we must weed our thoughts of negative, impossibility thoughts. Wherever we find a thorn in our minds and thoughts we must seek to sow a flower.

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Comments

2 Responses to “Think Bigger to Become Greater”

  1. vitalis matura on June 11th, 2009 3:48 pm

    your articles are kingdom material, we are blessed and empowered. thanx

  2. Tatenda Dunduru on June 25th, 2009 11:38 am

    Thanks so much for this one,its amazing what we can achieve when we choose to think BIG.

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