Yellow Car

One of the joys of having siblings when you’re younger is playing the game Yellow Car.

Every time you see a yellow car, you shout it out and if you’re first you get to hit your sibling.

The best game.

Suddenly, when you’re playing Yellow Car, every road seems to follow them.

They’ve always been there, but you’ve just never noticed until your attention was given a reason to care.

That’s the Baader-Meinhof effect in action.

This is the brain’s little trick where noting something makes you pop up everywhere.

It’s literally just selective attention. Your mind decides that yellow cars are relevant, so it tunes the world to highlight them. Then confirmation bias steps in to keep proving you’re right. And you think, oh, see, another one.

We can do the same thing for ideas.

The reason that you see a yellow car is because being able to spot a yellow car has consequences. There is a game involved.

Most coaches don’t see ideas in their day to day life because there is no consequence. They have nowhere to store their ideas.

They have nothing that they do with them consistently and therefore they tune out to those ideas because why would they keep them?

If you train your brain to see ideas everywhere because you know you’re going to store them and then develop them afterwards, your brain will see everything. The world doesn’t suddenly get more interesting. Your brain gets more interested in the world.

Most people drift through their days without thinking about what’s going on around them. If you decide to start the game and to declare that noticing that ideas matters to you, your brain will happily oblige.

You’ll clock patterns, contradictions, odd moments that others walk straight past. And that is the beginning of creativity. We’re not trying to summon inspiration out of the air, we’re telling our mind what colour to look for.