5 Tips to Keep You Sharp

culled from:entrepreneur.com

1. Read one article a day written by someone with an opposing opinion. Your brain chemistry switches on when you are met with competing knowledge or an opinion that flies in the face of your own experience. Be open to it. Read or listen to it all the way through, no matter how frustrated you become.
2. Learn one radically new thing every day and apply it to your life. Geniuses find unrelated things and put them together to come up with something new. You only do that by adding to your repertoire of experiences and knowledge.
3. Teach someone something that you're passionate about. The teaching process reveals new learning for you since people have different questions about what you're teaching. It causes you to stretch in your topic area. You have to be open to your knowledge being challenged. Surround yourself with people who don't think just like you do. Be brave enough to have dissention.
4. Get deep sleep. Entrepreneurs are notorious for claiming to only need two or three hours of sleep each night. Yet, research shows that neural connections are made when you've hit the deepest stage of sleep, and that occurs typically over a seven to nine hour period.
5. Practice "awake sleeping" or reflection. This is another way to allow the brain to find the new connections you're looking for. Find a few times a day when you can turn off anything that electronically gets a hold of you and simply reflect on what your needs are and how things are going. Be open to the ideas that come flooding into the canals of your mind.