“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions”, said Albert Einstein. Today, I want to invite you to travel in your imagination to four insightful places: Your happiness island, your achievement mountain, your unhappiness desert and your non-achievement cave. Our imaginary journey will allow you to gain insights into your personal sweet spots and pain centers — and ideally inspire some ideas on how to benefit from these insights. Are you ready to let your imagination fly?

Take out a big, plain-white piece of paper. Fold it in half both vertically and horizontally, so that you end up with four separate quadrants. Then, invest 15 minutes of your time for our little imagination exercise.

1. Trip to your Happiness Island: First, close your eyes and imagine yourself being on an amazingly beautiful island. Feel your body resting in the warm sand under a cooling palm tree. Listen to the soothing sound of the waves. Take a refreshing sip from a cool glass with your favorite cocktail, and notice how you start feeling extremely happy. Relish this feeling of happiness for two minutes, thereby thinking of other experiences that you enjoy and that make you feel happy. Then, open your eyes and note down all your happiness triggers in the first quadrant.
2. Hike up your Achievement Mountain: Next, imagine you are standing on the peak of a majestic mountain that you’ve just conquered. Feel the fresh breeze, enjoy the awesome panoramic view, and notice how proud you are. You’ve successfully made it to the top. Ask yourself: What other things have I achieved in my life that made me feel really proud of myself? What can I do better than others? List down all your achievements in the second quadrant.
3. Cross your Unhappiness Desert: After that, imagine you are crossing a hostile, endless desert. Feel the sun burning on your skin as you crawl through the hot sand. Notice all the despair, the loneliness, the hopelessness, and the unhappiness rising inside of you. Then shift your focus to other times when you experienced similar negative feelings. After two minutes, fill the third quadrant with all your unhappiness cues.
4. Trapped in your Non-achievement Cave: Finally, imagine yourself lying at the moist, cold bottom of a giant, dark cave. See the ascending way out of the cave into warming sunlight, and feel how you don’t have enough strength and skill to make it out of the cave, although you’ve already tried very hard before. Feel your frustration, anger and resignation about your inability. Then, think of other areas where you also cannot perform, regardless of how hard you try. Jot down all your low points into quadrant four.

Now review your notes, and look for any new insights into yourself: What do your listed points tell you? Can you identify any surprising patterns emerging across the four fields? How much time do you spend each week in each of the four quadrants? How can you boost your happiness and performance by reallocating your time? And what actions do you need to take to achieve more and become happier?

What has all of this to do with business? If you are a top executive or manager or entrepreneur, I charge you to repeat the same exercise with your team. Together, start your journey by taking a fresh look at your firm’s success potential:

• Fly to your Corporate Happiness Island: What are the vital few things that you do that make your customers — and yourselves — happy? How can you reinforce these happiness-inducing activities? And how can you create new memorable happy moments for your customers (and other stakeholders)?
• Climb up your Corporate Achievement Peak: What are the vital few areas where you achieve a much higher ratio of success and performance than your competitors? What can you do better than anybody else? How can you further these successful endeavors and play on what you can do best?
• Pass through your Corporate Unhappiness Desert: What are the many things that you do that are not really appreciated by your customers? What are the vital few activities that even make your customers (and employees) unhappy? What are the things you do that really suck? How can you fix or discontinue these activities?
• Descend to your Corporate Non-achievement Cave: What are the many ways where you achieve a lower ratio of success and performance compared to your competitors? What are things that you do where you perform really badly? How can you outsource or deliver these activities together with business partners that perform much better than you?

Conclusion: “People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering,” noted St. Augustine. As you experienced today, all you need to travel is a bit of time and your imagination. Is there an easier and cheaper way to gain novel insights and ideas?

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2009. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 2 April 2009.