Insight (inner-sight). You'd imagine all you need to do is think, introspect. But I believe there's a preceding step causing you to miss many insights and aha moments.

You can divide insights, aha moments, into two types: ones you discover yourself and ones you are shown. More accurately, insights caused by an internal trigger (pro-active) and ones facilitated by an external help (reactive).

You create an insight internally when you search and discover a new way to connect existing facts, pieces of knowledge.

An externally triggered insight happens when you perceptually observe some new fact. At times it is simply observing a new object of phenomenon. Other times you are shown something new or a new way of looking at the already familiar.

Underlying all these aha moments and insights, both the self-generated and the ones "given" to you by other people or perceptions, there is one fundamental. It's the "must have" that enables you to see, discover, create, posses (and enjoy) all aha moments, all insights.

An insight is a volitional thing.

It doesn't just happen to you passively. You have to decide "I want to discover something new". Then it can (though not guaranteed to) happen, and it will happen more, and more often.

An internal or external trigger occurs and you see something new. You consciously or subconsciously make a connection and see a nugget of (a potential for) new knowledge being born.

Whatever's the trigger, if you want to discover more insights and experience more aha moments, the most important part is the decision to want it.

"Fortune favors the prepared mind" -- Louis Pasteur

Make this a standing order and you will discover more insights, experience more aha moments.

I am an insight seeker and an aha moment lover. I think it's a combination of my natural affinity from a very young age, combined with a positive reinforcing experience spiral growing my volitional attention.

What is your story and experience? Please share as a comment below:

Stopping something you already do and are committed to, is hard, even when it is no longer viable.

To help, you can borrow a method from financial planning: zero-based budgeting.

In zero-based budgeting, instead of carrying over the last period’s budget and adjusting it, you disregard the past budget and start from zero. It means you need to justify everything again from scratch.

You may want to use this method when implementing your idea, and not just for budgeting.

Periodically, reexamine your decision to commit to a particular course of action, a sub-project you initiated as part of making your idea real. Justify its viability as if you were only starting. If you can’t, you know you need to stop doing it.

By forcing yourself to “start from scratch,” you’ll lose many of the biases that plague making the right decision, like status-quo bias, sunk-cost bias, and more.

You’ll see things clearer, and that will make it easier for you to make the right decisions regarding past commitments.