Chapter 6 - Letting Your Success Mechanism Work

Chapter 6 of Psycho-Cybernetics is about letting your success mechanism work without the interference of the conscious mind.

Creative ideas are not a result of conscious thinking from the forebrain. In order to receive an "inspiration" or a "hunch", you must be intensely into problem-solving and searching for the answer. The includes thinking about the goal consciously, gathering all information about the subject and considering all possible causes of action. Most importantly, you must have a burning passion to solve the problem at hand.

The philosophy Bertrand Russell in his book The Conquest of Happiness wrote:

"I have found for example, that if I have to write upon some rather difficult topic, the best plan is to think about it with very great intensity-- the greatest intensity at which I am capable-- for a few hours or days, and at the time give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done. Before I had discovered this technique, I used to spend the intervening months worrying because I was making no progress; I arrived at the solution more the sooner for this worry, and the intervening months were wasted, whereas now I can devote them to other pursuits"

Everyone is a "creative worker" and it is not reserved only for painters, artists, poets and writers. All of us have a Success Mechanism within us and it will work in problem-solving, running a business just as good as it will in inventing or writing a story.

The Success Mechanism in you can also produce "creative doings" (skills). Any performance skills such as playing sports, playing an instrument, conversation etc. is the doing of your Success Mechanism, not of your conscious thinking. Creative performance is natural and spontaneous. The most skilled of pianists could never play a whole song if he constantly and consciously thinks of which finger should play which key at which time. The pianist has previously given thought to this matter and practiced until his actions became second-nature. The "skill" we see is the automatic mechanism taking over when the pianist is playing the song.

5 Rules for Freezing Your Creative Machinery

1. Do your worrying before you place your bets, not after the wheels start turning

• Conscious effort and "willing" will jam and interfere the automatic mechanism. The reason why some people are overly self-conscious and socially awkward is because they are too consciously concerned and too anxious of every move they make. When they become overly self-concious, they jam their automatic mechanism.

2. Form the habit of consciously responding to the present moment.

• The creative mechanism only functions in the present time. Do not waste time fighting strawmen of the past

3. Try to do only one thing at a time.

• Even if we try to multitask and do everything at once, we can only do things one at a time. An analogy of this is an hourglass, and that each grain of sand (tasks) fall one by one in a single file.

4. Sleep on it

• Some of the greatest people have slept on some of their problems and have found the answers when they awoke. Your creative mechanism works at its peak when there is no disturbance from your conscious mind.

5.Relax while you work

• Recall feelings of happy times and relaxation to remove stress and tension. The less you are stressed, the better your Success Mechanism can work. By practicing the feelings of relaxation, it will be habit and you will no longer need to practice it.