A much more powerful way to think about breaking limits
Most of us have heard the phrase “the sky’s the limit.”
That sounds nice. But think about it, how many of us have our lives impacted by that thought? In fact, I can’t even remember when was the last time that thought crossed my mind.
After all, there’s not much of the sky for a few months of the haze season in Singapore. But something lateral do happen every day - we imagine.
How about tweaking this a little and say - “our imagination is the limit!”
Everyone of us, knowingly or not, lives within the confines of our imagination. Within this confine lies our thoughts, beliefs, principles and knowledge that we’ve formed - through which we act upon.
Our imagination is the real box.
Try this experiment. Replace the word “thought” or “think” with the word “imagination” or “imagine.”
Norman Vincent Peale famously said, “you are your thoughts.” How about stretching this a little with, “you are your imagination.”
Kishore Mahbubani wrote a book titled, “Can Asians Think?” What if we change it to, “Can Asians Imagine?”
Imagination is a type of thinking skill as much as it is a wrapper around which a person think. Can we “out-think” our imagination? Yes - this is when we start thinking outside the box.
How can we think outside the box? My answer is - do anything that stretches your imagination.
Try our best to be humble. ;-) Find opportunities to speak to people who are different, not necessarily “better.” But if they are better, all the more better. Pick their mind, leave no left-overs if possible.
Read books, articles, magazines. Speed reading helps. Start asking more questions you’ve never asked before. Research online. Lots of it. Stay current with technological advancement. It’s driving our world. Stay very current.
Dare to probe limits - even imagining about things that have never been done before. And then imagining yourself doing them.
On this note, I’d like to dedicate this article to Mr Lim Seng, who has been working on sending the first Singaporean into space.
It’s a matter of time Singapore will break this limit. Thanks to an imagination that never stops growing.