A mathematician recently noted that if you take 6 standard lego blocks there are 915 million ways of putting them together. And hence I suppose the choice: follow the instructions, or go solo – either way you’re bound to come up with something fun! Applying this to our lives, we can all no doubt remember times when things just seemed to fall into place … when out of the hundreds of millions of possible answers we just seemed to arrive at the right one … right?

One way to achieve more is to USE the lego sets in our brains. There are three things we can do to make the most of the absurd collection of multicolour blocks in our heads:

1. Understand it

2. See ourselves using it, and

3. Enjoy the journey!

It is useful to understand that the brain is a bunch of lego blocks. There are 100 billion of them and each one has thousands of connectors (known as axons and dendrites) so the possibilities are effectively endless.

This is why we need focus. When we see ourselves doing or achieving the things we want, we are setting out specific and unambiguous instructions to the subconscious brain which acts like a perfect team saying “Ok boss, leave it to us. We’ll get it done” and we are sometimes surprised at how quickly the team delivers. Lego the company very nearly went bust in the 1990’s, losing focus and control of everything from theme parks to the colours of its blocks. A new CEO saw the future quite differently (simple colours, social input into design, girls as customers). It’s now the No.1 toy company in the world.

Finally, it’s when we enjoy ourselves that we are most effective and our visions most likely to come to reality. Enjoyment is essentially evolutionary encouragement. Positive activity, interaction and thought are enjoyable precisely because they produce chemical responses in our minds which encourage more of the same – and that’s good for our survival. Perhaps the little people with removable hair and hooks for hands (who now outnumber humans in the world by the way!) are onto something – thanks to them there is now even a Professor of Play at Cambridge University.

We all have lots of lego in our heads – let’s USE it!

To see Adam’s original article, Click Here