How to win at Scrabble using RichThinking

I’m sitting in the window of our lovely beach cottage in the south west of Scotland. It’s a balmy evening, warm winds and a lovely sunset happening right now. I’ve won the game! This is unusual, in fact it has happened only perhaps 3 times in the last 17 years of playing Scrabble.

‘Scottish Scrabble’ is what we play; only ever played when at this cottage, and with the help of a Scottish dictionary. Before I tell you about the role Rich Thinking has to play in all this, you need though to know about our rules. They are a bit unusual…

1. We play against our own highest score (this is because I rarely win against Philip as we have such different playing methods: basically he likes to think a lot about how to get a 7 letter word all the time, and I can’t be bothered)

2. We look words up in the dictionary beforehand, in case they’re there. This is the Scottish bit — there are so many wonderful words that you can really get your creative juices flowing trying to make up mad sounding words and then seeing if they exist

3. He spends a long time thinking — and I get to read my book, hurray!

So with this context set, here’s how the Rich Thinking happened:

While Philip was pondering over his go, I was looking at my letters and I just could not see a word bigger than 3 or 4 letters. Not a great score. Finally I gave up and started reading my book again. Then I heard ‘It’s your go’. I looked at my letters and there was a 7 letter word.

That’s the RichThinking — sometimes you just need to take your mind off what you’re trying to do; let go; and see things diffeerently. Not to mention the magic that sometimes happens when you do this.…