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What's your red rubber ball? What inspires you? This is what Kevin Carroll, author of Rules of the Red Rubber Ball, What's Your Red Rubber Ball?!, and The Red Rubber Ball at Work asked attendees at this morning's closing general session at Great Ideas. [For more from Carroll, read Samantha Whitehorne's interview with him in the August 2006 issue of Associations Now.]

Carroll says play is serious business, and assists us with imagination, creativity, communication, teamwork, and doing more with less. We have to be able to sustain agility and nimbleness of thought and behavior. The way we do this, he says, is to hold on to the behavior of childhood and "exercise your play muscle on a regular basis."

Thinking back to my own childhood, I have to admit that I was especially curious about everything. I asked a lot of questions, to the point where I heard "because I said so" from my parents on a regular basis rather than the science behind Cheetos. As I got older, I learned there is a time and place to ask questions and that minding my own business is often better than being curious. But maybe this isn't the best approach to keep carrying into my adulthood.

Carroll talked about an art installation, a building with a huge, red ball stuck under the awning. He said that all the children who passed by the oversized red ball were curious about it, while many adults kept their eyes on their phone screens or to the ground.

Instead of ignoring your surroundings, Carroll says you must stay curious, be present, and take it all in the way children often do: "If you would just raise your head up from time to time, you could change your perspective to see things differently and see possibilities that you couldn't see before. Make an effort to look around."

Today, wherever you are, I challenge you to look away from your smartphone and instead at your surroundings. It's going to be easy for those of us still surrounded by the mountains in Colorado. But I have a feeling that even if mountains don't surround you, taking in your scenery with an open mind will show you something you hadn't noticed before.

And if anyone knows about that Cheeto thing, I'm still searching for answers.