Why think like a five-year-old?

- I recently had a meeting with the CEO of a huge technical audio visual company. We had a really interesting time and he was telling me about his frustration. He said, you know, Richard, I get to hire some of the most brilliant people on earth. They are technically amazing. He said, but one of my great frustrations is they still have a tendency to over-complicate everything. And I kind of glibly turned around to him and said well, maybe you shouldn't hire anyone over five. And as he was laughing, I said to him, no seriously. Think about it for a minute. Kids under five are amazing. They are self-development machines. Their curiosity, their creativity, their ability to solve problems, truly extraordinary. You know, those kids will do anything at any time. You put them in a room and they will take building blocks and modeling clay and build them entire world around them. They believe in Santa. They believe in the Tooth Fairy. They believe in anything. They have a kind of, I can attitude. Yet, as we get older we tend to be blindsided by the things that get in the way, the obstacles, the reasons why we can't do stuff. So maybe if we think more like five-year-olds, we can accomplish extraordinary things. And the good news is there are three simple things that I want to share with you now that you can do to tap into your inner five-year-old. The first is the idea of the I can. Now, most of the time, whenever we think of the problem through as adults, we talk about the things we can't do. So simply changing that language from thinking about the things you can't do to the things you can do can be hugely beneficial. The second thing which children do which again, sadly as adults we don't spend enough time doing is playing. As kids it's something we're expected to do, but as that adult, somehow we see it as something immature. But you know what, if you get the modeling clay out, if you just lose yourself in your imagination for a little while amazing things happen. You open your mind up to possibility, and that allows you to think clearly and with less complexity. And the third thing really comes from my time as a school principal working with these remarkable children. And it's the ability to laugh. You know, as adults, we spend so much of our working lives working hard and being serious because we see work as important and vital. Yet we forget that actually it's really important to laugh, even in our professional lives. And it's important to laugh in our professional lives because it allows us to relax. And if we're relaxed, we think clearer. And if we think clearer we're able to solve complexity in much more simple form. So the next time you feel that kind of friction come on, that blocker in front of you, that I can't do something. Just take a step back, take a breath, and say, "I'm going to tap into my inner five-year-old". When you apply some of these principles in reality, like the tech CEO did who I'd gauged frustration from at that early meeting, amazing things can happen. So he set up play areas inside the organization. He filled them with toys, with building blocks, with modeling clay. And he said, you know, Richard, the results were profound. Because what I was telling my managers and people to do was when they were feeling stressed, when they were feeling they were dealing with a problem that was over complex, they should step out, go to one of the play areas, lose themselves for a few minutes in their imagination and a world of their own and see what happens. And amazingly, when they came back into their workplace, when they re-engaged with the challenging issue they were dealing with, they found it far easier to cope with the problem. And in fact felt that the solutions came to them far more simply. Really in so many ways, it's child's play.