research

, , ,

Why Can't You Get Anything Done? The Know-Do Gap for Artists.

, , ,

The knowing-doing gap was popularized by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton. The knowing-doing gap is essentially: You know what you have to do. But, the doing doesn’t happen. Therefore, the results don’t happen.

Below are a few examples of how the know-do gap can show up in your life:

  • I KNOW I have to start that essay my professor assigned us at the beginning of the semester, but I DO it two days before it’s due.

  • I KNOW I should be getting medical help for this reoccurring problem, but only until I start coughing up blood is when I DO it (this example is a bit extreme, but you get my drift).

Tap Into Your Creativity

For all you creative types, this article is for you!

"Take this clever experiment, led by the psychologist Michael Robinson. He randomly assigned a few hundred undergraduates to two different groups. The first group was given the following instructions: “You are 7 years old, and school is canceled. You have the entire day to yourself. What would you do? Where would you go? Who would you see?” The second group was given the exact same instructions, except the first sentence was deleted. As a result, these students didn’t imagine themselves as seven year olds. After writing for ten minutes, the subjects were then given various tests of creativity, such as trying to invent alternative uses for an old car tire, or listing all the things you could do with a brick. Interestingly, the students who imagined themselves as young kids scored far higher on the creative tasks, coming up with twice as many ideas as the control group. It turns out that that we can recover the creativity we’ve lost with time. We just have to pretend we’re a little kid." - Jonah Lehrer

Lehrer mentions so many other ways to be creative in different settings; continue to the article here.