Entrepreneur.com.ph

Just as the brain shouldn't be divided into left and right, a person's intelligence shouldn't be compartmentalized into academic, artistic, technical, analytical, entrepreneurial, or such other categories. So says Tony Buzan, reputed as the world's top guru on mind power and creativity, who was in Manila recently for a two-day workshop called "Unleash the Genius of Creativity & Innovation for a Competitive Edge".

According to Buzan, it's not advisable to box in the intelligences and capabilities of people-especially the youth and students-into specific categories. "To divide a young brain into technical or scientific, into creative or academic is actually dangerous because the great academics or scientists were incredibly creative. If you were to limit them into technicians and scientists, you will then have really bad technicians and really bad scientists. It's catastrophe, it's really dangerous."

He says that this wrong approach is no different from some people's limited perspective of what an entrepreneur is. "When people define an entrepreneur as a businessperson who makes money-that's only partly true," he says. "An entrepreneur is actually a dreamer or a visionary who has the knowledge and method to make that dream or vision come true-ideally for the benefit of humanity at large."

In his study of the great geniuses of the times, Buzan, who introduced a learning technique called "mind maps," says the pattern that emerges is that the great thinkers had great imagination: "The great geniuses were great daydreamers. We structured our brains to think that business people caught daydreaming should be ashamed of it, when in fact they shouldn't be."

Mind maps, which Buzan labels as "The Swiss Army Knife of the Brain," is now used by over 250 million worldwide, and he says that they can greatly help Filipino entrepreneurs make sense of all the tasks they have to do, such as envisioning, controlling, project management, communicating, team building, and monitoring. He explains: "Mind maps can help Filipino entrepreneurs or business people clarify their thinking. What a mind map does is it allows you to immediately access your multiple intelligences so that you can effectively use them in performing any task or activity."

Buzan offers this advice to budding entrepreneurs: invest time, energy, and resources in studying how your brains work and how to develop your multiple intelligences. He explains: "Imagine being in a new business and you are cloned. There are two of you now. Assume that one of you stays exactly the way you are, while the other one spends six months improving his her memory, creativity, physical health, leadership skills, stress tolerance, etcetera. Now, after six months, when these two individuals compete in the business world, who do you think is going to win?"