Laugh Your Way Into the Next Big Idea

I don’t know about you, but I hate serious meetings. On second thought, make that loathe completely. In fact, I do everything I can to lighten the mood. I can recall being in executive staff meetings, with suits, ties, and bad coffee—the youngest person in the room by at least a decade—and busting out my very best Swedish Chef impression. Or another time when I demonstrated how to deactivate the new door security keypads without having to remove the keycard from your pocket by getting close and friendly with the wall.

The cool thing about humor is that it helps you exercise the same mental muscles that you use when applying creative thinking strategies. Humor begs us to look at things from a different angle, or with a different set of assumptions. It helps us to apply optimism to a problem to find something good out of what might be really bad. And it gives us a little bit more room to think in terms of a hypothetical which may lead us to an entirely new revelation.

So next time you are faced with a very difficult problem, remember the lyrical words of Monty Python:

If life seems jolly rotten
There's something you've forgotten
And that's to laugh and smile and dance and sing.
When you're feeling in the dumps
Don't be silly chumps
Just purse your lips and whistle - that's
the thing.
And...always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the light side of life...