How would you like to ensure (1) complete blindness to the real issues at hand, (2) irrelevance and inability to connect to the greater needs of your target and (3) become a complete bore at the same time? Sound like a great deal?
But wait! There’s more!
If you act now, you can also experience the utter terror of watching your creative drive wither on the vine and become completely disconnected from reality.
Want to know how? I call it “nose in the niche” and it is a seductive epidemic that’s sweeping the create-on-demand world.
“Nose in the niche” is what happens when we become so obsessed with an extremely narrow problem, focus exclusively on our small part of the solution or start to weed out seemingly irrelevant data so that we are ignoring important and potentially useful stimulus.
I’ve experienced this many times in my life, and I’m usually pretty far down this path before I recognize that I have a problem. (“Hi, my name is Todd and I have my nose in my niche.”)
Some symptoms include:
1. Extreme obsession with a problem, at the exclusion of everything else in your life.
2. Unwillingness to listen to advice from others.
3. Obsessively comparing work with others, especially those who do similar work.
4. Being generally closed-minded about exploring alternative solutions.
5. People stop hanging out with you.
There are five generally accepted “phases” of creative problem solving. They are (1) defining the problem, (2) research and absorption of relevant information, (3) breaking and allowing the info to “connect” and provide breakthroughs, (4) the “a-ha!” moment (or as we call it, the “creative accident”), and (5) implementation and testing.
When we have our “nose in our niche” we are perpetually stuck on phase two. We are continuously absorbing data in hopes that staring at the problem even harder will provide a solution.
The remedy for “nose in the niche” is to take a break from the problem. Try something new. Explore other problems, or find some way to take your mind off of the one you’ve been working on. In the book The Breakout Principle (amazon link) author Herbert Benson says that performing repetitive tasks at the end of a long period of data collection can be a way to find new solutions. (It takes your mind off of the problem long enough for patterns to form.) Whatever your method, it’s important to occasionally break from a problem so that your mind can do what it does best - solve problems.
So, am I the only one who struggles with this? Am I the only one who doesn’t know when to take a break?
