How to Assemble Your Mental Toolbox | Mind Performance Tricks

Trick 75. Assemble Your Mental Toolbox

Knowing many mental techniques is good, but having a few “tried and true” mind performance Tricks always sharpened and ready to use can be extremely useful.

Despite my familiarity with a wide variety of mental techniques, I sometimes forget to use mind performance Tricks when I need them most. For example, many times I could have used hypnosis [Trick #61] for self-motivation, but I simply didn’t think of it in the moment. Similarly, in the middle of an argument, it’s not easy to remember that the neutral point of view [Trick #64] can be a useful tool for settling disputes.

How can you remember to use mind performance Tricks when you need them? You will need to do a little preparation in the form of outlining and memorization, but after that, you need to form only one habit: haul out your mental toolbox in moments of perplexity.

 

In Action

To create your personal mental toolbox, you’ll need to follow five steps:

 

Inventory your mental tools

The first step is to collect the Tricks you find most useful. This book is a good place to start, of course, but many other books are available on becoming a better thinker, and you might have some Tricks of your own. Use your catch [Trick #13] to collect your Trick inventory as you think of it. These Tricks will form the tool part of your toolbox.

Consider which tools work well together

You might want to include a Trick in your toolbox because it works well with another Trick. For example, the two Tricks beginning with H in the following section (Hypnosis and Heroes) work well together, as do the two S Tricks (Seeding and SCAMPER).

Create a mnemonic “box” in which to put the tools

You’ll need to create a mnemonic to hold your Tricks together. This is the box part of your toolbox. You might want to use an alphabetic mnemonic such as SCAMPER [Trick #22], or you might use a memory palace [Trick #3].

Tune your toolbox

Never be afraid to tinker with your toolbox. J. Baldwin of the Whole Earth community had a portable machine shop in an unfolding walk-in van that he called the Highly Evolved Toolbox because it was slowly refined over 50 years.¹ Let your own toolbox evolve in a similar way, and leave some spare slots, or some other way you can edit your list.

Keep your tools sharp

It should go without saying, but a tool in your toolbox that you can’t use is just mental clutter. Learn to use the mind performance Tricks on your list. Practice them from time to time if necessary. The same is true of tools that don’t turn out to be as useful as you thought they might: if you put something in your toolbox and then find that you don’t use it, take it out and try something else.

 

In Real Life

Here’s a small sample mental toolbox. Different people have different needs, so they will have different toolboxes. Your own toolbox might look quite different from this list.

The Tricks I selected for my toolbox had the initials AFGHHNOPSS. I took these letters and created the anagram GH’S FAN SHOP. Since GH in my personal Dominic System list [Trick #6] is represented by George Harrison, I expanded the mnemonic to George Harrison’S FAN SHOP and represented this mentally as a shop for fans of the late Beatle, with a mechanical George Harrison out front, playing guitar and tapping his foot in his characteristic way.

This imaginary storefront could become the beginning of a memory palace [Trick #3] (as described later in this section), but in my case, it serves only to remind me of the acronym, which stands for the following Tricks:

 

G: Gott’s Principle [Trick #45]

Estimating the duration of any phenomenon with simple math.

H: Hypnosis [Trick #61]

Motivating yourself with persuasive self-talk. You might find it useful to combine this Trick with the other H Trick, Heroes, since you can use hypnosis to enter deeper into the worldview of your chosen hero.

S: Seeding [Trick #19]

Picking a random object from your environment as the seed of a brainstorming session. You might find it useful to combine this Trick with the other S Trick, SCAMPER.

F: Forced connections [Trick #20]

Combining simple elements in random waysor every possible wayto develop new and complex ideas.

A: Analogical thinking [Trick #25]

Finding what’s similar about two patterns and extrapolating from one to the other.

N: Neutral point of view [Trick #64]

Defusing quarrels by rationally analyzing the discussion.

S: SCAMPER [Trick #22]

A toolbox within your toolbox that contains a set of brainstorming strategies. You can use SCAMPER to operate on the output of the other S Trick, Seeding.

H: Heroes [Trick #31]

Keeping a compact set of alternate personalities within your toolbox (they fold up nicely). You might find it useful to combine this Trick with the other H Trick, Hypnosis.

O: Onar [Trick #28]

Plumbing your unconscious with a tool that’s almost as simple as falling asleep.

P: Priming [Trick #12]

Priming the pump of your brain when long-term memory comes up dry.

Here are the first three items from a hypothetical memory palace [Trick #3] that you might use as an alternate way to memorize your toolbox, or to reinforce the alphabetic list. In keeping with the GH’S FAN SHOP mnemonic, I’ll assume that the store is called George Harrison’s Crackerbox Memory Palace and Hardware Store.

I walk past the storefront with the mechanical figure into the bright interior. Various tools are tucked into the nooks and crannies [Trick #4] of the shop:

Gott’s Principle

In the near-left corner of the store is a pile of compasses; their arms form triangles, each of which contains a single Masonic eye (Gott means God in German). I pick one up and find that the arms of the compass will stretch to measure anything.

Hypnosis

On the left wall is a display of rotary saws. Printed on each blade is a black-and-white spiral design. When I turn one on, the spiral rotates slowly and I find myself becoming sleepy, sleepy….

Seeding

In the far-left corner is a barrel full of seeds with a big zinc scoop. When I look at a seed closely, thunder and lightning sound, and I see it’s a tiny braina brainstorm seed!

Everyone carries around a set of mental tools that they habitually use to solve problems, collected over many years. This Trick enables you to design your toolbox consciously and to always have your tools within easy reach.