I’ve had this broom for more than 25 years. Other than the paint chipping in places, it is still in pretty good shape considering all leaves, grass clippings and whatnot I’ve swept up over the years.

How is that? You’d think that after 25 years of sweeping the bristles would be bent over to one side or the other. No matter how good the Shakers designed brooms, this is bound to happen at some point.

When I was in high school I learned how to draft. Not how to pick players in fantasy football or how to get behind a big truck to deflect the wind, rather I learned how to make technical drawings used to build things. Like houses, machinery, furniture, etc.

Drafting is done exclusively on computers nowadays, but back in those dark ages of high school we used pencils and paper, the same way Brunelleschi did back in the Renaissance, when he practically founded the practice of architecture for the Western world.

One of the keys to being a good draftsman (or draftswoman, as the case was with Beth, the only girl in my drafting class), was the consistent weight of the lines you drew. Different thicknesses in lines could mean different things depending on what you were drawing. This subtlety might not be that important when drawing an exploded view of a tool, but if you drew something designed to handle electricity, the varying lines thickens might lead to something slightly more explosive.

The key to consistent line weight was to twirl the pencil while you drew. You do this by slightly twisting the pencil in your fingertips while you pulled or pushed it across the page. Try it for yourself. When you learn how to do this — and there is a trick to doing it — you not only get lines that are consistently the same, but you can go long stretches between having to sharpen the pencil.

So what does this have to do with the durability of my broom? Surprisingly, everything.

As an experiment, after destroying another broom I applied that same idea of twirling a pencil while drawing to sweeping. Twirl the broom every time it is used, never sweeping in one direction for more than a few strokes. The bristles never have the chance to get bent in either direction, so they have stayed straight all these years.

This is a very handy tip I’m sharing to help extend the life of your broom.

But this story also shows how taking a creative approach to even the simplest task can solve a problem. How taking two completely different things and combining them into in a new and novel way can produce a solid result.

Drafting and sweeping couldn’t be further apart, but by making a simple creative connection, the problem of wearing out my broom was solved. So much so, I haven’t bought a new broom in years.

So the question becomes what are things you do in life that might be applied to other areas of life, inside or outside of work, to make things better? Learning to see and make these connections is a giant step towards creative problem solving.