“Creativity is just connecting things.”—Steve Jobs
GARY V
In 1978, a family of nine fled the communist regime in Belarus by migrating to the US. They settled in a cramped studio apartment in New Jersey. The father worked hard at a liquor store, eventually purchasing it. His journey sparked an entrepreneurial spirit in his son, Gary Vaynerchuk, who went on to become a renowned figure in the business world.
Gary V, as he is commonly known, developed his entrepreneurial instincts at a young age. He started by selling lemonade and baseball cards, making up to $3,000 a weekend when he was 14. As he put it, “when you have $30,000 in cash under your bed, and you’re not selling weed, you’re doing a good job.”
Gary honed his salesmanship working at his dad’s wine and liquor store. He kept an open mind and stayed curious about the products and the customers. He had a deep desire to understand what drove their purchasing decisions. Gary once said, “I think I’m a great salesman because I listen and watch. I’m behavioral. It’s hunting. I look for patterns. I pay attention to what people do.” One day he realized that his customers preferred shopping with someone who was a wine connoisseur. Around the same time, social media was taking off. Gary’s instincts kicked in. He combined the trend of social media and his knowledge of wine. First, he renamed his dad’s store to Wine Library and bought WineLibrary.com. Then he capitalized on the growth of the internet by being one of the first businesses to set up an e-commerce store. Lastly, Gary started WineLibraryTV, a long-form, episodic YouTube show where he sat down, tasted wines, and authoritatively talked about them. This strategy was a success, and Wine Library grew into a $60 million business.
PATTERN RECOGNITION
Gary’s entrepreneurial journey didn’t stop there. He invested in companies like Facebook, Twitter, Uber, and Venmo and opened a social media marketing company, VaynerMedia, which works with Fortune 500 brands. He was also an early adopter of e-commerce, social media content, and blockchain technology. Today, the world respects his ability to predict and combine future trends.
Gary Vaynerchuk’s business success is largely due to his exceptional pattern recognition skills. While most people consume information, only some understand how to connect the dots. Gary instinctively connects seemingly unrelated dots. This skill enables him to plan, organize, and execute ideas in budding niches long before other people see its value.
Pattern recognition can help you approach creative challenges from new angles. It encourages blending genres of music or styles of art. It allows entrepreneurs in every industry to stay ahead of their competition. It helps fashion designers predict stylistic trends in society.
The best way to develop this skill is through pattern-recognition tools. Mind mapping is one of the most common tools. Let’s explore the power of mind mapping and how you can use it to unlock your pattern recognition abilities.
THE SCIENCE BEHIND MIND MAPPING
Dr. Roger Sperry’s Nobel Prize-winning research uncovered the brain’s cortical skills and how they enable us to process inputs such as words, colors, and images. Cortical skills refer to various abilities associated with the cerebral cortex, such as perception, attention, memory, language, and problem-solving, which are important for cognitive functioning and learning. In the 1960s, Dr. Sperry conducted groundbreaking experiments on a patient with a severed corpus callosum, which bridges the brain’s two halves. He discovered that the same stimuli given to each eye caused the patient to respond in oddly specific but different ways. This observation led to the discovery that both halves of the brain practically function independently and are responsible for different cortical skills.
However, the most interesting outcome of his research was that the higher the number of cortical skills involved in absorbing a piece of information, the better you learn and process the information. It showed that the brain processes visual information better than verbal or textual information. Ralph Haber’s work, published in Scientific American, affirmed this. His research showed that nine in ten people could recall more details of an image than a text block. That’s why it’s hard to remember someone’s name but not their face.
These two revelations about how we process information and learning give mind mapping its potency. You convert your thoughts (verbal information) into drawings (visual information). A mind map is a visual representation of how ideas connect. It is an effective tool for developing ideas or organizing your knowledge creatively.
ORGANIZING YOUR IDEAS
Knowing which mind-mapping technique to use will maximize your creative output. There are five mind maps you should integrate into your mental toolbox.