This is one of my favourite techniques for making the most of my intelligence - especially my creative intelligence. It is a way of doing less work and getting better results. Many people know about the technique and some of the benefits, but they don't use it because of a lack of discipline.

Yep, you need discipline if you want to use this technique to do less work! This is not a contradiction. The discipline comes from doing a little bit of work early on instead of putting it off.

I'll illustrate why this is so important with a tale of two students...

Jonny:

Jonny begins his semester at the University of Slackers. In the first lesson he is given a course outline, including a choice of questions for the essay due in 12 weeks. He has a brief look at what's going to be covered in this unit, but doesn't even bother reading the essay titles because he knows they're not due for almost 3 months. This is Jonny's favourite time of year because he knows he can get away without doing any work for a while.

After 10 weeks, the lectures stop and the students have a few weeks to work on their essays. Jonny has other essays due as well. One is not due for 3 weeks still, so he doesn't worry about that. The essay for this unit is due in two weeks. And another essay is due in just one week. Obviously he forgets about this essay, and races towards the earlier deadline.

People that practice journal writing benefit tremendously. It really should be more widely known that the process of writing down your ideas is one of the greatest tools for learning and creative thought.

Investigate the lives’ of most geniuses and you’ll find they’ve either scribbled in the margins of the books they’ve read, or have separate note books full of their thoughts.

Their notes are not usually linear in nature, and they don’t always stick to the lines. They usually doodle as well. They are free flowing, uncensored thoughts that trickle out of the brains of these great minds and onto the page.

The meaning of dream imagery is already known to you. You do not need a dream dictionary, because the dream interpretation comes from you.

You may find dream dictionaries to be fun, but they are essentially a waste of time. Certain symbols may occur over several people’s dreams, but this is just a reflection of society. Since certain symbols and ideas are common knowledge they manifest themselves in different people’s dreams. But by reading about these definitions in dream dictionaries, you don’t get a sense of how they relate specifically to you.

And they do relate specifically to you. The meaning of dreams you have are related to the questions you’ve posed for yourself during the day, and they relate to matters of concern that you may not have been thinking about. Sleep experts are still arguing over the meaning of dream time, but we do know they can be extremely useful in gathering answers which elude you during the day. Thus the expression: I’ll sleep on it.