Use 'distance' thinking to encourage creativity and good decision making

In my never-ending quest to find out more about creativity, I'm really intrigued by a recent article in Scientific American called An Easy Way to Increase Creativity by Oren Shapira and Nira Liberman.  It's something you'd probably guess but just never thought about.

Studies show that 'anything that we do, that we do not experience as occurring now, here and to ourselves falls into the 'psychologically distant' category.'  Wow, what a useful finding! 

What this means is that if you can take yourself out of the equation, you can make a better decision. If you want to solve a problem, figure out how to think about it from another angle (not yours.)

Getting distance from a problem could mean anything from changing the environment to imagining that the problem is happening to some other small company or in some other century or civilization.  Try it and let me know what you find!

Sidebar: It won't help you with those 'The train is leaving the station at"...questions. But some things are not meant to be solved.