The 50th Law - 50 Cent [88]
SUBVERT YOUR PATTERNS
Animals depend on instincts and habits to survive. We as humans depend on our conscious, rational thinking, which gives us greater freedom of action, the ability to alter our behavior according to circumstance. And yet that animal part of our own nature, that compulsion to repeat the same things, tends to dominate our way of thinking. We succumb to mental patterns, which makes our actions repetitive as well. This was the problem that the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright was obsessed with, and he came up with a powerful solution.
As a young architect in the 1890s, Wright could not understand why most people in his profession chose to design buildings based on patterns. Houses had to follow a certain model, determined by materials and cost. One style became popular, and people copied it endlessly. Living in such a house or working in such offices would make people feel soulless, like cogs in a machine. In nature, no two trees are ever the same. A forest is formed in a kind of random fashion and that is its beauty. Wright was determined to follow this organic model rather than the mass-produced model of the machine age. Despite the cost and energy, he decided that no two buildings of his would ever be the same in any way. He would extend this to his own behavior and interactions with others—he took delight in being capricious, in doing the opposite of what colleagues and clients expected from him. This eccentric manner of working led to the creation of revolutionary designs that made him the most famous architect of his time.
In 1934 he was commissioned by Edgar Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department-store magnate, to design a vacation house facing a waterfall on Bear Creek in rural Pennsylvania. Wright needed to see the design in his mind before he could commit it to paper; for this project nothing would come to him, and so he decided to play a game on himself. He simply ignored the work. Months went by. Finally Kaufmann had had enough and telephoned Wright—he demanded to see the design. Wright exclaimed that it was finished. Kaufmann said he would be over in two hours to look it over.
Wright’s associates were aghast—he had not yet penciled in one line. Nonplussed and with a rush of creative energy, he began to design the house. It would not face the waterfall, he decided, but stand over and incorporate it. When Kaufmann saw the design, he was delighted. The house became known as Fallingwater, often considered Wright’s most beautiful creation. In essence, Wright had forced his mind to face the problem without research or preconceptions, completely in the moment. It was an exercise to free himself from prior habits and create something totally new.
What often prevent us from using the mental fluidity and freedom that we naturally possess are the physical routines in our lives. We see the same people and do the same things, and our minds follow these patterns. The solution then is to break this up. For instance, we could deliberately indulge in some random, even irrational act, perhaps doing the very opposite of what we would normally do in our day-to-day life. By taking an action we have never done before, we place ourselves in unfamiliar territory—our minds naturally awaken to the novel situation. In a similar vein, we can force ourselves to take different routes, visit strange places, encounter different people, wake up at odd hours, or read