Meet nothing I bet you weren’t expecting a book about nothing, were you? Since most books are about something, this must mean you’ve stepped out of your comfort zone. Hats off to you! If you’re smart, the first thing that popped into your mind was that this book should be entirely empty because that truly would be a book about nothing, right? In a way, you are right. But I see an empty book merely as a notebook, a dump for your brain, which is for people who think they know everything. But they don’t. They know nothing! What you’re holding in your hands is far better than an empty notebook. It helps you to think better and do better. And it reminds you to get more out of nothing. Ironically, this book is full of nothing. Therefore, I like to call it a think book. The things you’ll find in this book are not brainstorming techniques to get more ideas. It’s all nothing and not pretending to be more. This book is simply about one thing: thinking different. That thing we all say we do, but we don’t. I want to take your mind to places it hasn’t visited before. You can write in this book. Doodle in it. Make sketches. Tear the pages apart. Use it to get through boring meetings. Have a little dance on it. In my opinion it’s not a book unless you turn it into one.
Quite a few brilliants minds have already been doing this for decades. From Albert Einstein to Steve Jobs to Haruki Murakami. They focused on the gaps, the spaces in between, and all the things that ordinary thinkers wouldn’t care to notice. I think it’s in our human nature to see relationships between things. This is good and bad for your creative thinking. It’s good because you can easily jump from one idea to another. But it can also work against you because you keep thinking in the same circles. These circles are made of assumptions. For most people it’s pretty hard to step out of this pattern. Creating something out of nothing is perhaps more an attitude than it is a tool. It’s a way of looking at things and no-things. It gives you tremendous freedom to go anywhere from right where you are. It’s about letting go of logic and logical reasoning. Part of what makes nothing so great is that it is subject to change. The more we know and learn about the world, the more we know about nothing. Enough said, let’s get cracking with nothing.
Connect with nothing “I am nothing. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.” Japanese writer Haruki Murakami describes it very well; it’s better to have no connection with anything. When you have a connection with something, you immediately are less open to other things. When you’re connected to nothing you’re independent and more imaginative. Free yourself from the things you love and like and discover a world beyond that.
Focus on nothing around you and write down your observations
Capture nothing Sitting on your idea won’t make it better. Unless you’re a chicken, you don’t need to brood over your precious conceptions. There’s only one way to test all the assumptions you make and that’s by creating. International photographer Annie Leibovitz photographed everything and nothing when she first started. The subject didn’t matter to her. What mattered was photography. You learn ten times faster by doing stuff than learning stuff from others. In fact, ignore this write up and go do. When you’re not creating, you’re not allowing yourself to learn.
Draw a metaphor for nothing
What happens with your idea when you try to solve nothing?
Be nothing Buddhists consider nothing as the ultimate state of mind. They call it shunyata, a Sanskrit word for having sublime focus. It’s the consideration that all things and beings have no intrinsic existence; they’re sheer relativity. What has this to do with creating ideas? First of all, by letting go of the concept that nothing is something negative. It’s a space you want to be in as often as you can, because it’s the beginning of things.
What things have nothing to do with the problem you’re trying to solve?
Dream about nothing In a legendary interview with Mike Wallace, Salvador Dali said that the most important things happen in his sleep. He explains he likes to create in that moment of sleep. Dali: “My best ideas come through my dreams.” It’s not a passive state in which we know sleep. It’s a state of creation where ideas flow. Sometimes we force the ideation process too much. Dream a bit more during the day to relax your noodle every now and then. This is where your unconsciousness takes over and your thinking becomes unlimited. Use this nothing-dream-state to get a bulk of ideas.
Pretend it’s nothing Klemens Torggler, an Austrian artist, created an origami shaped door that opens like a trackless slide. And the best thing is, he never considered it to be an invention, he calls it a simple discovery. In fact, he wasn’t even interested in doors. To him it started because all other designers stopped. If he would pose the question, How can I create a door that will change our lives drastically? He might not ever invent the Evolution Door. What he did was make the concept of a door so small and insignificant, until it almost became nothing so he could then lift off with bigger thoughts. What things do you have to label as nothing, to make your brain think you can do better?