Brain Juicer
The Brain Juicer Report
By Alexandre Valois
Brought To You By
www.thePLRstore.com
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Brain Juicer
Foreword
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In the world of business, where survival of the fittest is the rule,
creativity is essential. In fact, it is the lifeblood of an infopreneur’s
business. Whether you are publishing e-books, new softwares,
writing articles, website design, or affiliate marketing. The truth is,
creativity will not only give you more business. It will set you
apart from competition.
I often hear business owners complain about how they are facing
such and such problems, not being able to find a creative solution.
Or fellow internet marketers short of ideas for new products.
With those people in mind I have decided to go forward and
publish this Brain Juicer report, filled with techniques to get your
Creative Juices flowing.
Without further ado, let’s get started.
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What is Creativity?
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The Websters dictionary’s definition is as follows:
“Creativity is marked by the ability or power to create–to bring
into existence, to invest with a new form, to produce through
imaginative skill, to make or bring into existence something new.”
The focal point of this definition is “something new”. Without the
right techniques you could spend a lot of time thinking about many
different things before you actually come up with something new.
Eureka! Then comes the moment where reality kicks in and clashes
with your idea. Sure, it is unique, but is it useful? If your idea
won’t solve a problem, help make life easier, or have anything in it
to attract and keep other people’s attention, you’re better not waste
your energy.
I will not explore in details the topics of finding a problem to
solve, choosing a niche market, or evaluating your ideas here. This
report will only focus on one thing: Helping you get your creative
juices flowing.
In the next chapters I will cover:
•Developing the creative attitude
•The Creative Process
•The Brainstorm
•… And More Techniques
•Mind and Body Exercises for Increased Creativity
Let’s get started.
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Developing the Creative Attitude
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Intention. This is the first step towards improved creativity. Before
you do anything else to improve your creativity, you must intend
it.
Take a few minutes and think of all the advantages that an
improved creativity would have on your lifestyle. How will it help
make your life easier? How will your business grow? What impact
would it have on your relationships with friends and family?
Write down at least 10 of these on a sheet of paper.
Done?
Great!
You see, not only have you started building intention, you’ve
already proved to yourself that you are a creative being. This is
what’s wonderful with the human mind. Everyone is capable of
creativity. The human brain was developed to ask questions and
seek answers.
The problem lies in the fact that our society imposes strict rules
and models on us. Slowly, we integrate them into our lives without
even realizing, automating everything, thus neglecting this need to
seek for more answers. Luckily for us, there is always hope, and a
few daily exercises will help you regain your creative fitness in a
flash.
A creative mind is a healthy mind.
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Sadly, for the reasons stated above, reflection and the creative
process have become, for many, mind-crushing activities that
should be avoided at all costs.
If you are one of these people, do not worry, by the end of this
report you will either:
A) Learn to enjoy the creative process in your everyday life and
the benefits it will have on your health, wealth, and relationships
-Or-
B) Learn better techniques that will save you time and make the
creative process easier for you, so that you can spend your energy
in other parts of your business where you will enjoy it.
So, with that in mind, start developing the creative mindset today
by doing things differently. Take a different route to go to work,
buy something new at the grocery, and take your wife out on a
romantic date that will surprise her.
Remember, even though creativity is essential to increase your
bottom line, it has always been and will remain an every-day
matter. And you will benefit by developing a better creativity in
your everyday life.
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The Creative Process
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The creative process sums up all the steps that our mind must go
through in order to find a solution to a problem. By studying this
process, you will have a better idea of the influencing factors of
creativity, be able to better define your strong and weak points
regarding to creativity, and build shortcuts and techniques to
supplement these weak points and improve your overall creative
experience.
The whole creative process can be divided in seven different steps,
each playing a different role in giving birth to new ideas.
1. Orientation: pointing up the problem
2. Preparation: gathering pertinent data
3. Analysis: breaking down the relevant material
4. Ideation: piling up alternatives by way of ideas
5. Incubation: letting up, to invite illumination
6. Synthesis: putting the pieces together
7. Evaluation: judging the resulting ideas
Let’s discuss the role and importance of each of these steps, as
well as new ways and techniques to help you get best result for
each of them.
Orientation: This is the first step which will give direction to the
whole process. In this step you are required to define, as precisely
as possible, what the current problem is, as well as the desired
outcome.
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Most people go through this step subconsciously and never really
bother much about it, as most of the time, the answer seems
evident. But in reality, it is not always the case, and by not having
a clear idea of what exactly the problem or desired results are, you
might end up with pages of ideas that won’t answer at least one,
sometimes even both, of these focal points in the creative process.
When defining the problem and writing down your definite goal,
make sure you are specific, but do not get into details. The more
general your frame of thinking will be, the less constraints you will
have during the creative process.
The answer to these two questions is supposed to be a starting
point giving you direction, specific plan of action and ideas will
come at a later stage.
Preparation: During this step you will gather pertinent
information. This is where you will conduct market research, as
well as build an inventory of all the skills, resources, and contacts
that you can use, starting from your initial problem, to reach your
desired outcome.
At this stage, do not leave anything out; build a list as exhaustive
as possible. You do not want to let your critic mind keep you from
moving forward either. Write everything down, even things for
which you might not see any use at the moment. Chances are they
will come handy somewhere during the process, and you will be
pleasantly surprised by the results you can get from something you
thought would be useless.
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Go ahead, write down a list of every tool you have access to,
contacts, special skills and knowledge. See yourself as a business
in itself, what assets do you have?
In this step, if you plan on releasing a new product, you will also
conduct what is often referred to as market research. What
information can you gather about this specific market, what are the
needs, who are the customers?
Once again, do not leave anything out; you might be surprised by
the results. If you’re working on designing a new car and realize
your customers love chewing gum, even though it has nothing to
do with cars, write it down.
Analysis: In this step, you will sort the results and analyze them.
Do you see any recurring trends, any recurring problems, or assets
that could be easily combined together to create something more
efficient? Even though you are not yet ready to start generating
ideas, you will probably start having a feeling of what to do.
Sort your assets into categories, build your customer model using
the information you gathered, identify the market trends.
Back to the car example above; your sources told you that your
customers loved chewing gum. So you build a model to represent
your perfect customer. Let’s say, man, in their 30’s, single, who
loves chewing gum and the color blue. You have no idea what the
final result will be, but chances are it will be blue and fitting for a
30 year old single. It might even include a gum dispenser
somewhere, and grab an additional percentage of the market share
in the long run because of this.
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Ideation: During this phase of the process, you will throw as many
ideas as possible to the wall. Don’t stay around to see which ones
will bounce, just keep throwing them. Write down everything you
can think of, even those things that seem too crazy, too impossible,
too easy, too anything.
This step is the most well-known and often called Brainstorming,
using different techniques to help generate a huge amount of ideas
in a short time. See the next chapters for full Brainstorming
techniques you can start using to improve and facilitate your
creative process.
Incubation: Now comes the easy part. Sit back, and relax. Go
about your daily activities and try not to think much about it. Let
all those wonderful ideas sit and blend together. As you move on
to other things, you will start seeing references to a few ideas
you’ve written down, things that will reinforce your feelings about
them, others that will simply take them out of the game.
There is really nothing you can do to help this process. For some it
will take weeks, for others a matter of hours, depending on the
complexity of the initial problem and desired outcome, as well as
how trained your mind is to this kind of activity.
The thing to keep in mind through this step is: Relax!
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Synthesis: You’re almost done! You’ve let your ideas blend into a
tasty creative juice, now is the time to distill everything and keep
only the best of the best. As they say, cream always rises to the
top.
I’ve found throughout the years that the best way to go about this
step is not to simply throw away every idea that may not work, or
be used. That would be a waste of valuable time and energy.
Instead, store them somewhere in a binder, write them down on
small recipe cards that you can store in a plastic box, anything that
works for you.
Write down the idea itself, as well as why it may not work, or the
reason why the idea has been rejected for this project.
The creative process is not over yet, and you may need to come
back to these ideas later on as a plan B (in case the worst happens)
or simply to build on your existing project (which we hope will
happen).
What’s more, as you keep them all filed somewhere you can access
them easily, you will have no problem re-using some of these ideas
during the preparation phase of future projects.
Evaluation: The closing step of the creative process, evaluating
your results is essential. You are now ready to take action and
move forward with the application of your new ideas, but it is
important to keep track of everything and come back as often as
possible to your original ideas list to see how you can improve, or
how you can correct a potential flaw.
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Also, once your project is 100% complete, make sure you go out
and get as much feedback about it as possible from everyone
involved. Get your partner’s opinion as well as your customers.
Write every comment down, good or bad, and add them to your
binder or idea box.
Feedbacks are important as they will point out your strengths and
weaknesses, and you will also be able to use them in future
projects.
The Brainstorm
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You probably already have a good idea of what Brainstorming is
about, but let’s go through a quick definition to refresh our
memory.
Brainstorming is a process designed to obtain the maximum
number of ideas relating to a specific area of interest. Although the
results will be better when conducted with a group, anyone can use
it to generate new ideas is a short time frame.
Now this is a bit weird, but in order to be fully effective, a
Brainstorming session must be framed and controlled as much as
possible. Set a time limit, usually between 30 and 45 minutes, and
make sure you will not be disturbed during your session.
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If you are conducting your Brainstorming session with other
people, make sure everyone understands the problem.
Here are some of my favorite Brainstorming techniques to use that
will unstuck even you from what looks like the most desperate
situations.
For optimal results, it is suggest that you move from one technique
to the other as you work on different projects, or combine them in
new and different ways. Doing so will help renew your creativity
and avoid having your mind develop new models to trap your
creativity in.
… and More Techniques
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Technique 1: Parallel Thinking
When using the parallel thinking technique, you want to answer
find an answer to your initial problem, as with every other
techniques.
With this technique, instead of asking if a proposed solution is
good/bad, you’re trying to figure out where every possible solution
leads. You recognize there is no one solution, and that every action
leads to different results. Thus, you try to find as many different
paths as possible, and follow them until you achieve your desired
outcome.
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Technique 2: The Six Thinking Hats
This technique has the advantage of removing social fear from
group masterminds. Everyone talks through a role that has been
given to them, so they can voice fears they might not otherwise.
Using this technique, you will analyze the problem and seek
solutions from different angles, each of them corresponding to
different ways of thinking/being. When you conduct the
Brainstorming session, move from the first to the last one on the
list. If you have a group, try having every member wear a different
hat.
Introducing the six hats:
1.White hat: The scientist
2.Red hat: The artist
3.Black hat: The bodyguard
4.Yellow hat: The leader
5.Green hat: The mad scientist
6.Blue hat: The architect
The white hat:
The scientist’s focus is on hard facts, without analyzing. His role is
mainly to provide the data and information that will set the ground
of the Brainstorming session. His voice is the voice of reason.
The red hat:
The artist’s focus is on emotions and intuitions. His role is to word
his feelings about the whole topic, ideas submitted, his
impressions, gut feelings, and intuitions. If you are red hat, do not
try to justify your feelings. Just let them out.
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The black hat:
The bodyguard’s focus is on security. His role is to find every
possible flaw, and the thousand ways why your idea will not work.
The purpose of this is not to bash anyone or anything, but to avoid
wasting time and energy on something not worth it, and identifying
potential threats.
The yellow hat:
The leader will always find a way to success. His focus is on
finding new ways of making the plan work, and turning any
situation to his advantage. His energy and enthusiasm should be
contagious.
The green hat:
The mad scientist has only one question in mind: “what if”? He is
the one who generates new ideas out of the blue, combines existing
bits of information to create something totally new (but not always
effective). Unlike the leader, the green hat is not so focused on
results as he is on generating new ideas.
The blue hat:
The architect is the one in charge of organizing the information,
making sure everyone gets to speak in turn and calling
inappropriate comments. The blue hat’s main focus is to make sure
the session is well framed as well as submit a clear action plan at
the end of the meeting.
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Technique 3: The freewriting
This technique is best used alone, and consists in writing down
every thought that cross your mind. Write everything. Got writer’s
block? Write that down! Let your thoughts flow on the paper,
without trying to analyze or interpret anything.
After your session is over, go over everything you’ve written.
There will be lots of filler and random thoughts, but if you look
hard enough you will find a handful of gems also. Highlight them,
or copy them on a new sheet.
Technique 4: The association game
Grab a piece of paper and write the following on it:
“_____________________ Is ________________”
On the first line, write down your main topic, what your
problem/question is about. On the second line, jot down the first
thought that cross your mind in association with it.
An example of this would be:
Creativity is important, or
Creativity is boring, or
Creativity is stealing other people’s ideas without getting caught.
I guess you get the point.
Once you’re done, look at the associations you’ve made, and see if
there are any noticeable patterns. Can you categorize your results?
Where does it lead you?
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Technique 5: Break it/fix it
Using this technique, you take an idea, and smash it into pieces.
You deconstruct it as much as possible, taking out every element
you can think of, and write them down. Then, going from element
to element, you try reorganizing to create something new, just as if
it were building blocks.
Technique 6: Amplify it
With the same idea as the break it/fix it technique above, you will
try to amplify everything out of proportion. Make each element so
huge, so small, so funny and so evil, that you’d be ashamed to tell
anyone about it.
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Mind and Body Exercises for Increased Creativity
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1.Do things differently. Every day.
2.Eat and sleep well.
3.Relax. Take a break once in a while.
4.Stretch and breathe deeply.
Do things differently. Every day.
Eat dessert first. Take a different path to work. Sleep on the couch.
Do whatever it takes to go out of your way and experience new
things every day. Not only will it help improve your creativity, it’ll
give you something new to yak about.
Eat and sleep well.
Depending on your age, sex, and other biological factors, humans
need between 8 to 10 hours of sleep per night. Also, having a
healthy diet and eating fresh fruits and vegetable will help improve
your creativity as well as your concentration.
Relax. Take a break once in a while.
It is recommended that you take a break after forty-five minutes of
mental work, to help avoid exhaustion and keep your mind sharp.
The break doesn’t have to be long, five minutes will do, but it is
important that you get up and move on to something else during
that time.
Stretch and breathe deeply.
Stretching and breathing deeply helps bring more oxygen to the
brain, which in turn keeps it in optimal shape to perform mental
work.
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