Do you want to know how to keep from ever being bored, while at the same time growing smarter and more capable every day? The answer is not some ancient secret like meditation (though meditation IS quite useful, and CAN make your brain more flexible, thereby improving your ability to solve problems… ie smarter and more capable)… the true answer is to feed your mind by seeking out at least one new experience a day.

If you are bored, or feeling stuck in a rut, the easiest way to get over that feeling is to go do something new. How well it works, how far away it banishes those feelings, is directly related to how different the new thing you do is from something you’ve done before. If you do something completely new, especially if you find out you enjoy it, it can banish boredom for weeks. If it’s just a little different, it might only get rid of the feeling for a day. But if you do something new every day, then it’s hard to feel bored.

Doing something new also makes you smarter and more capable. That is because it forces you to learn new patterns. This is basically food for your mind (ie the title, “Feed Your Mind”). Increasing pattern recognition can work in one of two ways… you can refine a pattern you already know (seeing a new kind of car, especially if it looks fairly different, refines your “car” pattern), or you can learn an entirely new pattern. The second has more effect on your intelligence and “capable-ness”. Either way, they make you better able to fit other new situations into the patterns you have, or better able to form new patterns. That means you solve problems faster (smarter) and easier (more capable).

So new experiences help you get rid of the deadly feeling of boredom, which is, essentially, the cause of quite a large number of stupid actions and decisions. They also make you better able to quickly and easily identify the solution to new problems. Thus they make you both appear smarter (others judge you based on your actions, mostly) and actually smarter. In other words, they feed your mind. So go… do something new!