The incubation stage is about achieving deep renewal with courage.
Motivation Process
The function of the incubation stage is to undo the damage of past programming and not only to restore but also to develop the original spontaneity of a child; this spontaneity is not, however, by any means a blind, disorderly urge. The incubation stage changes skepticism to enthusiasm and takes you on an odyssey, a voyage of exploration, motivation, and change.
In our first chapter, we discussed theories and sciences. Now is the time to implement these sciences into a practical system.
In the creative process, the incubation stage plays an important role. How long does it take? It might take one day or one year. Inside the incubation stage, you will follow a transformation path from apathy and boredom to motivation and then to passion, creativity, and innovation. Passion is your motivation in the boiling waters. On each trip, we will show you the tools you need to accomplish this transformation.
Apathy—–>Motivation—–>Passion—–>Creativity—–>Innovation—–>Entrepreneurship
We call the path above a physical path. What actually happens inside the mind? The path below is a mind map.
Finding Nobility and Virtue in Task Concentration——> Imagination (Visualization) + Learning——-> Goal-oriented, hard work, and creativity Unification (connection)
The most noble of pleasures results from exercising skills in novel ways and in the bliss of freedom; the incubation stage is about achieving such pleasures where participants feel a sense of discovery, spontaneity, creativity, challenge, exploration, problem solving, concentration, and connection. Using the incubation stage, you will learn to focus, achieve new skills in observation and attention, and be more creative and innovative. The ultimate goal is to experience the joy of creativity.
The first stage of motivation is incubation, where you venture into new waters and dispel the old myths with a new vessel, compass, and maps, and hopefully you will return transformed and motivated.
As we discussed in the first chapter of this book, most sciences, if not all, deal with only one piece of the problem: apathy, motivation, creativity, and innovation. No one has yet put all the pieces together and treated the problem as a whole. In fact, I suspect that no one has yet perceived the problem as a whole—or, at least, seen it for what it is. This is a process. The purpose of this chapter is to put it all together and analyze this process.
The incubation stage is a new, bold, and encompassing theory where you focus your way out of apathy and triumph over your lack of interest. The incubation stage is a healing spiritual environment that stimulates full human potential for motivation, empowerment, optimism, physical and emotional health, and real happiness. With the results of your incubation stage, you will hopefully achieve success, expand your personal empowerment, and continue to create a solid basis for happiness and healthy spirituality.
In the incubation stage, you will find and let your child-like imagination roam free, trying to find joy in immersing itself in the process and observing and searching out new information. Observing like a child and asking the right question as child-like (not childish) as possible is crucial for the incubation process. The idea and the outcome are to have the capacity to feel that you are childlikely inspired.
Inside the incubation stage, you will remember the child in you who likes to challenge himself or herself to become competent, apparently just for the enjoyment of doing it. Like children, inside the incubation stage there is no reward or punishment for learning or doing what you really like; you are just actively engaged in the process of learning. There is no boss or higher authority. Indeed, you will learn that the child in you is intrinsically motivated to learn. A more fundamental and useful way to think about the incubation stage involves the process of doing an activity for its own sake, for the reward that is inherent in the activity itself, just like children do. Children do things not to achieve a goal; they are curious and they want to know. Children are curious and learn intrinsically. In the incubation stage, you learn the technique to be motivated again. Like children, being intrinsically motivated has more to do with being completely involved in an activity than achieving a goal.
Einstein asked questions that were so fundamental that the answers transformed our understanding of the physical universe. In the study of Einstein, Howard Gardner, in his excellent book Creating Minds, examines the connection between the kinds of questions a gifted child ponders and the nature of training and thinking required for the adult practitioner to answer such questions. In the same manner, professor Gardner examines Picasso and the relationship between productivity associated with youthful prodigiousness, on the one hand, and with mature mastery, on the other. Gardner says if, in early life, children have the opportunity to discover much about their world and to do so in a comfortable, exploring way, they will accumulate an invaluable “capital of creativity,” on which they can draw in later life. If, on the other hand, children are restrained from such discovering activities, pushed in only one direction, or burdened with the view that there is only one correct answer or that correct answers must be meted out only by those in authority, then the chances that they will ever cast them out on their own are significantly reduced.