Awake at the Wheel: Getting Your Ideas Rolling
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I hardly read self-help books because I’m a self-motivated person (seriously!). Stephen Covey’s “7 Highly Effective Habits for Highly Effective People” was my last motivational book, simply because it was a “required reading” for a Management course I took.
Unlike other motivational books, “Awake at the Wheel” begins with the fable of Og, the caveman who invented the wheel. Og is portrayed as an average Joe or Jamal or Jee Yee with a job, a wife, a house (or a cave) and a son. One day, he stumbled upon his Big Idea and he:
“…found it hard to sleep at night. Hard to sleep and hard to hunt and hard to do just about anything but think about his Big Idea.
He thought, of course, about telling someone - his best friend, Ugh, perhaps, or Aargh, his beloved wife - but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it, not quite sure they would actually understand.”
We then follow Og as he goes through the frustrating, lonely, steep, obstacle-and-objection-filled yet EXHILARATINGLY EXCITING road of the creative process.
Along the way, inspirational quotes from other great folks (e.g. Einstein, Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, Edison, Rumi, Helen Keller, Lao Tzu and Shunryu Suzuki) accompany him (and us) on the sidebars.
I got a real big kick out of reading this book (as opposed to Mr. Covey’s although I believe that he has some really good points on being highly effective) because the writer, Michael Ditkoff spent 4 years researching the prehistoric cave paintings in Dordogne, France to use as a basis to Og’s story.
Instead of the usual dreary way of describing the cavemen or the Stone Age a la our history books, Ditkoff gives a quirky, modern (albeit American), business world-oriented flavour to Og’s story, with a whole lot of puns thrown in plus the odd “cavemen” language.
I assure you that you’ll have a barrel of laughs when you reach the part when Og presents his idea at the “Big Meating”. Not only does public speaking makes him nervous but the thought of sharing it with a bunch of people almost made him change his mind.
And sadly (which is also true in the working world), Og’s idea is poked, prodded, torn and ripped to shreds the minute he got it out of his head. Naturally, he became very depressed.
Luckily, the pioneer Big Idea guy, Crouch (Father of the revolutionary way of posturing for cavemen), sent for him and decided to give him a pep talk. In case you’re thinking that Crouch gave him an ANSWER, he didn’t.
Instead, Crouch played the role of “facilitator”, which is what teachers should do instead of teach. He helped to cheer up Og up and then sent him off with another puzzling thought, which got Og back up on the road again in search of answers…
Fortunately for Og (and the rest of humankind), he arrives at the idea of the wheel, with the help of his young son, Ogle 
Who should read this book?
Anyone who’s stumped for ideas, stuck in a rut, want to get creative and especially those who work in a corporate environment with its set rules, procedures and often, stifling ideas and people who ironically urge you to “think out of the box”.
Besides the fable, Ditkoff includes 35 ways to get the wheels turning categorized into 5 groups of thinking, fiddling, brainstorming and massaging your own Big Idea until it becomes something concrete.
Also, there is US$100 and US$1,000 to be won if your Big Idea is included in the “still-to-be-named sequel” to this book and if your submission is voted the best reader-submitted tool to be published in the “still-to-be-named sequel”
Go to www.ideachampions.com/toolcontest.shtml to find out more!
With Lucas creating havoc at home, I’m holding on to Picasso’s advice i.e.
“The act of creation is first of all an act of desctruction.”
And I can’t wait to read Ditkoff’s sequel because I hope he’ll tell us what happens to Og next!
Awake at the Wheel: Getting Your Ideas Rolling (in an Uphill World)
by Mitchell Lewis Ditkoff
Publisher: Morgan James
(ISBN: 978-1-60037-295-7)
