The Latte Factor

The Latte Factor

Writing is valued by our culture as proof of intelligence, but who has the time?   

In the time it would take ordering a mocha latte Starbucks (7-minutes) you could have written an article, about 500 words or 3 Pages.

The 7-Minute Author™ provides a structure that can quickly turn your experience and know-how into something your audience can witness.  The Latte Factor gives you the time. Find a daily activity that you enjoy and substitute the time lost waiting with time spent writing.

Or, say your goal is to write a book. Just turbocharge the Latte Factor. By linking all of your Starbucks Latte moments they really add up; (5 days a week equals 60 pages or 10,000 words.  In five months that 50,000 words, add a month for rewriting, and editing and in less than six months you’ve written a book.   The average how-to book is 50,000 words.

You’ve got to look at more than just know how; today we need a plan and path to follow.  The ADD Advantage

The 7-Minute Author™ method and The FAST Book are found at www.attractionbuilder.com

Author Larry Chambers

Author Larry Chambers Ojai,CA.                                                                                                                                                                              Photo by Christin Chambers

Another similar example of less is more is found in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink wrote about Dr. Lee Goldman an emergency room physician.  Dr. Goldman discovered that too much information was causing doctors to make mistakes in the ER by missing a heart attack because they failed to recognize when someone was on the verge of having one. He found that a person could walk in a hospital with chest pain and get advice that was all over the map. A patient might be sent home by one doctor or checked into intensive care by another.

Goldman fed hundreds of heart attack cases into his computer, looking for things that could predict a heart attack. He came up with a standard equation that took the guesswork out of treating chest pain. But his equation only had three factors:

( 1) Is the pain felt by the patient really unstable angina? (2) Is there fluid in the patients lungs?, and (3) Is the patient’s systolic blood pressure below 100?

Goldman then drew up a decision tree that recommended a treatment option for each combination of the three risk factors. Ironically, the only place he found interested in funding his research didn’t come from tile medical community but from an unlikely source — the U.S. Navy. The Navy supported the project for the most arcane of reasons: If you’re tile captain of a submarine, snooping around at the bottom of an unfriendly ocean, and one of your sailors gets terrible chest pains, do you risk giving away your position by surfacing and evacuating the sailor—or do you just give the sailor an antacid and hope he doesn’t die?

My take: having a degree doesn’t mean you are smart, it just means you’re good at taking tests and enjoy spending years and years on boring class work.

Dr. Liam Hudson Director of the Research Unit on Intellectual Development at King’s College, Cambridge England wrote a book about this back in the 60s[1].  He toured around English public schools—elite schools—giving hundreds of tests to the most promising 15- and 16-year-old boys. What he found was the boys with the highest IQs were the least creative while the most creative scored low on the IQ.  Hudson realized that the standard IQ test questions required a convergent answer.

He defined two type of thinkers; the scientific ‘converger’ and the artistic, imaginative ‘diverger’.   Converger aims for a single correct solution to a problem while the imaginative diverger generated many possible solutions.  He also wrote how universities testing was designed to accept the ‘convergent thinker over the divergent thinker which has caused an abundance of convergent thinking in our society.  They have dominated the colleges and universities and had a competitive advantage over the divergent thinkers when it comes to jobs, careers, and professions.

Dr. Goldman was demonstrating divergent thinking when he chose a different pathway than the established route.  By the way, Medicine (IAI) is the third leading cause of death; incorrect procedures, infections, side effects from drugs and bad advice.  Don’t believe me look it up.

The convergent thinking doctors select the most likely pathway by excluding all other routes.  Each step results directly from the preceding step, to which they remain firmly connected.  The soundness of the resulting conclusion is proven by the soundness of the steps by which it has been reached.  On the other hand the divergent thinking doctor is capable of holding conflicting thought and systems of value.

The reason Goldman couldn’t get funding for his research from the medical establishment; it’s made up of convergent thinking gatekeepers who are going to disapprove of anyone being imaginative.

The successful divergent thinkers learned early on how to maneuver around obstacles and bypass the guarded convergent thinking systems. The occurrence of dyslexia among wealthy entrepreneurs is stunning.  A few examples: Kinko’s founder, Paul Orfalea; Charles Schwab, Jet Blue’s David Nelman; Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, and Quentin Tarantino.  Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, reported in an interview that self-made millionaires are four-times as likely to be dyslexic as the rest of the population

Best

Larry

[1] Contrary Imaginations – A Psychological Study of the English Schoolboy Dr. Liam Hudson Pelican Books 1966

Advertisement

~ by larrychambers on January 13, 2010.