How Do You Think – Reactively or Creatively?

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

 How We Think -Reactive or Creative

Long ago, in ancient China, there lived a peasant farmer named Chang Wei-Kung. Now back in those days, in China, subsistence farmers like Wei-Kung relied heavily on their sons to help with planting, cultivation, and especially to bring in the harvest at the end of the season.

Wei-Kung had only the one son — named Chi — he was a big, strong, strapping fellow, of whom his father was extremely proud.

One day, as father and son were walking to the fields to begin the harvest, they were so caught up in their conversation that Chi didn’t notice where he was stepping, and in a flash he had fallen and broken his leg.

“Oh, no!” his father cried, “This is terrible!” And, in truth, in those days a broken leg WAS a grievous injury, one that could even result in death if left untreated. But soon the village doctor came and set the son’s leg and assured both men that it would heal just fine.

Wei-Kung was, of course, relieved to learn his son would heal. Yet he still faced a troubling dilemma:
How to bring in the harvest without Chi’s help. Despite his relief that Chi would live and be healthy, a dreary sense of gloom and despair settled over him.

He’d just have to do the best he could, maybe he could find others to help, but the thoughts of losing his harvest loomed bleakly before him and his heart was heavy. Wei-kung was thoroughly convinced that Chi’s accident was a disastrous tragedy.

The next morning, as Wei-Kung prepared to go to the fields to do what he could manage on his own, he heard a rumbling far off in the distance which he soon recognized as the sound of hundreds of hoof beats.  Startled by the sound, he delayed his departure and waited to see what was happening.

Soon he got his answer, as a massive army led by a fierce-looking warlord thundered into his front yard. “All able-bodied men come forward!” the warlord’s lieutenant shouted. “You are hereby inducted into service and will come with us now!”

Wei-Kung bowed before the lieutenant and explained that he had only one son and that he was unfit for the army because he had broken his leg just the day before. The warrior chief scowled and ordered a man into the house to see for himself if Wei-Kung’s story were true.

When he was satisfied, he simply nodded to his lieutenant who quietly raised his hand, and the horde of men and horses disappeared over the hill as quickly as they had arrived.

Wei-Kung was elated and shouted, “Such a blessing!”, as he embraced his son.
“How wonderful it is that your leg is broken and you are not to be taken from me!”

Situations Clearly Influence The Way You Think

Now, I ask you to bear this story in mind as you review this passage from Wallace D. Wattles‘ life-changing, forgotten 1910 classic, The Science of Getting Rich:

“To do things in the way you want to do them, you will have to acquire the ability to think the way you want to think. This is the first step toward getting rich. And to think what you want to think is to think TRUTH, regardless of appearances.

Every individual has the natural and inherent power to think what he wants to think, but it requires far more effort to do so than it does to think the thoughts which are suggested by appearances.

To think according to appearances is easy; to think truth regardless of appearances is laborious and requires the expenditure of more power than any other work we are called upon to perform.

There is no labor from which most people shrink as they do from that of sustained and consecutive thought. It is the hardest work in the world. This is especially true when truth is contrary to appearances.”

So what was the TRUTH of Wei-Kung’s situation?
Was Chi’s accident a terrible thing — or a wonderful thing?

Depends on how you look at it. We all experience similar situations on a daily basis. Just this morning I had an occurrence which definitely impacted my thinking. I need to modernize one of my websites; my brick and mortar business, the awlhousewash website is looking a little tired and is in need of a complete overhaul and I’d planned to work on it over the weekend.

Everything was in place, I’d decided exactly what was needed and I sat down at my desk to begin work, I use Macromedia’s Dreamweaver 8 for all my web development and so I fired up my computer and proceeded to locate Dreamweaver and fire it up. I double click the icon on my desktop, and nothing happens. That’s weird I was just using it the day before. So I try again and again it fails to fire.

At this point, I’m getting frustrated because of the importance of what I needed to do and the limited time I have to complete the work. At first, I think, DAMN – this is not what I need right now. I was reacting to the situation and allowing it to have a negative influence on my demeanor.

By shifting my viewpoint, just a little, I was able to think around the problem and come up with the necessary solution. I shifted from reacting – to a more creative thought process and very quickly the issue was resolved. Dreamweaver still isn’t working but rather than spoil my day it freed me to work on another project.

The sixth president of the United States, John Quincy Adams, wrote this:

“Let us consider an alternative style of thinking, which we can call ‘creative thinking.’ It is playfully instructive to note that the word ‘reactive’ and the word ‘creative’ are made up of exactly the same letters. The only difference between the two is that you ‘C’ [see] differently.”

Sometimes we can get ourselves into the habit of seeing things in a negative way, a way that doesn’t serve us.

But we DO always have the CHOICE of how we see. And sometimes, as with Wei-Kung, we need something to come along and just smack into us to force us to see and think a different — better, more positive, more creative, more USEFUL — way, don’t we?

Now, in case you think I’m only “preaching” platitudes and nice stories, let me assure you that everything I share with you here is something I have either experienced or am currently experiencing myself while on this journey to create a better life. And so it is with this “is it good or bad?” lesson.

I think back to 1995, when my wife and I were working together as a ‘Contracted Management Team’ for a wholesale/distribution company.

It was early December 1998, and we were right in the middle of the pre-christmas madness making sure that everything was in place to see us through the final weeks of the holidays and we’d have enough stock in the market for the New Year – when we get a call from the owner of the company requesting a meeting with my wife and I.

We thought nothing of it at the time and agreed to meet with him after work that day in our offices. We figured he was coming to congratulate us for the phenomenal job we’d been doing – WELL How wrong we were.

That afternoon, we sat down together and within minutes our mouths had literally dropped to the floor. This guy shocked us completely by first telling us what an amazing job we’d done but then immediately followed it up with – “I’m sorry guys – I’m going to have to let you both go” he went onto say, “the company is in need of restructuring and we simply can’t afford you anymore.”

We were absolutely stunned, dumbstruck is probably a better description and we knew that what he was telling us was nonsense because we knew the financials inside and out. Anyway that’s not important – remember this is 2 weeks before Christmas and we had two kids at home who relied on us for everything.

I won’t go into the details but as you can imagine this had a huge impact on us both and we would need to seriously sit down and think carefully about what to do next.

What Do You Think – Good or Bad?

Right then, we thought it was Bad – but you know what, we’ve all felt that kind of shock, betrayal, loss, disbelief, anger, humiliation, or pain at one time or another. That’s just part of being human and being an attendee in the “School of Hard Knocks.”

And it’s so EASY simply to react and let those flooding emotions just take us over completely, to sink into despair and into the competitive mind (where we judge the other people involved and ourselves so harshly), to say as Wei-Kung did, “This is terrible!”and to feel that all is lost.

But still, there IS that choice — to be creative rather than reactive, to CHOOSE another way of looking at the situation.

Creative mind is always available to us, but as Mr. Wattles notes, sometimes it’s REALLY hard work — “the hardest work in the world.” And yet, in my experience at least, that choice is the surest route to truth rather than mere appearances.

And wisdom? It doesn’t show up in a nice, neat package labeled “Wisdom.” It gets delivered through experience — and through our decisions about how to view our experience, what value and meaning we CHOOSE to assign to events.

You know, Thomas Edison awoke one morning to find his laboratory and his life’s work had been destroyed in a fire. And he looked at the ashes and said that he was glad because all his mistakes had been wiped out and he now would have the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.

We all have that opportunity. Every day, in every moment. What had initially appeared bad to my wife and I turned out to be a blessing in disguise. We went on to commit to each other that ‘Never Again’ would we work for anyone else and in January of 1999 we set up our first company.

As I’ve said here — and more than once — if we have chosen unwisely in the past, it doesn’t matter because the great gift is that we can re-think and choose again right now.

And the truth is, when appearance is telling us that our current experience is “bad,” we must KEEP choosing — over and over, in each and every moment — to see beyond those appearances so that we don’t miss the opportunities that are presenting to us even as the doors on others, that we have outgrown our need for, are closing.

It’s not a one-shot deal where you tie up all the loose ends quickly and neatly and then move on, but an ongoing process of discovery, challenge, and growth.

We’re all in this process somewhere; we truly ARE all in this together. And by our choices from moment to moment we determine whether we just spin round and round, seeming to bump into the same challenges and potential lessons again and again, or accept them and move forward, spiraling upward to greater things, upward to the greater good for ourselves and for all.

If you have found or are finding yourself in a situation or circumstance that is, let’s say challenging then perhaps you’re in need of a new opportunity which could be the very reason you’ve found your way to this page. Maybe it’s time for you to examine how you think. Maybe it’s time to think ‘there’s got to be a better way’. If you want to learn a new way to think – click on the image below and join the best think tank on the planet.