Weekly Tweaks

It’s been so quiet and empty around here lately, I can hear my own thoughts echo. In fact, maybe it’s not the heat that’s been driving these dreadful headaches all week, but the echo reverberations may be at fault.

I’ll have to think about that… that… that…

Oh, never mind.

I’ll just take some more Advil, and get on with the Tweakage.

[click to continue...]

This morning I went wandering through my bookshelf in search of a quick yet creative tweak to share. There, hiding behind a box of colored chalk was my long neglected copy of Roger von Oech’s Creative Whack Pack

Flipping through it, I decided to steal adapt one of his “Whacks” for a Tweak. He’s all about creativity and inspiration such, so I figure he won’t really mind inspiring me (Especially if I plug his stuff. Repeatedly. Did you know he has a blog chock FULL of “whacks”? Check it out: Creative Think )

But on with the Tweak !

On page something or another of his book, A Whack on the Side of the Head , Roger asks a series of example “What if” questions, intended to help spur you to better creative thinking. One of them caught my attention; he asks: What if humans had seven fingers on each hand? How would that affect our lives; what would it be like?

Then he muses a bit about if we’d have two thumbs, how it might affect typing, our number system, and musical instruments.

Being me (the overachiever from hell) I couldn’t just suggest you consider a potential finger mutation. No! I had to personalize it.

See, it’s all about the Antlers. [click to continue...]

*Ahem*

Ok, ok, stop laughing already. This is a serious tweak, dammit! Don’t you care about the plasticity of your brain, expanding your creativity, and so on? Oh fine. Keep giggling if you must.

[click to continue...]

Over on Twitter, one of the more interesting memes I’ve run across is “Two Words”.

I’m not sure how it started, but the idea seems to be that if reducing a conversational message to Twitter’s 140 character limit is good, then limiting your message to two words must be even better! (Minimalism is sort of an obsession on Twitter)

The Two Words challenge I’ve liked best was from Mike Sansone :

“Tell me what work you do in two words.” [click to continue...]

Get your permission slips ready, because we’re going on a field trip this week. We’re off to visit Luciano Passuello’s latest Litemind post: Sharpen Your Critical Thinking With E-Prime.

What is E-Prime, you ask?

Short for English Prime, E-Prime is a form of the English langauge which makes this sentence (and the last one) impossible. [click to continue...]