NY” logo in 1977:
All men’s miseries derive from the inability to sit still in a quiet room alone.
Boyd Matson looks every bit the adventure journalist he is: rugged, sturdy, and built for danger. His National Geographic television series Wild Chronicles and Explorer and weekly column “Unbound” seem to say it all: he was born to be wild, live on the edge, climb every mountain, dance with death, and test every limit imaginable. He’s been scratched, bitten, chased, attacked, pooped on, and even kissed by animals ordinary folks see only in the zoo.
Boyd taught me an extremely valuable, in fact lifesaving, lesson: how to stand still when the hippos charge.* That strategy underscores the sixth and final law of subtraction: Doing something isn’t always better than doing nothing.
Doing nothing is, of course, impossible. One of my favorite exercises in my creativity workshops is to begin with five minutes of doing nothing. No one can do it, because it can’t be done. Even the meditators are doing something.
When we say we are doing nothing, what we really mean is that we are taking a break from our normal business in some way. And as it turns out, that is when our brains are the most creative.
How and why that’s true is the subject of this final chapter.
In late spring 1905, an utterly frustrated 26-year-old Albert Einstein decided to pour his head out to his friend and fellow Swiss patent office worker Michele Besso. Einstein revealed the puzzle he had wrestled with for the last seven years: either James Maxwell’s equation or Isaac Newton’s laws had to be wrong, but he couldn’t figure out which one. Both were pillars of modern physics, but they were completely incompatible. The solution would unify all of physics.
Einstein laid out the issue to Michele: the intricacies of Maxwell’s theory about light traveling at a constant speed contradicting Newton’s concept of absolute space and time. He talked for hours until he once again surrendered to the problem—completely exhausted both mentally and physically—whereupon he announced his defeat and intention to abandon the quest for a solution. Ten years was more than enough time to devote it.
Melancholy from his failure, Einstein pushed his thoughts to the back of his mind and headed home. Riding in a streetcar, he gazed out at the famous clock tower that dominated the city of Bern. Suppose, he pondered, his streetcar raced away from the clock tower at the speed of light. What would happen? He was suddenly struck with the realization that since light could not catch up to the streetcar, the clock would appear stopped, but his own clock—say, his pocket watch—in the streetcar would beat normally.
“A storm broke loose in my mind,” Einstein recalled later. “Suddenly I understood where the key to the problem lay.” Here’s what Einstein recorded on a discograph in 1924, nearly 20 years after changing the world with his theory of special relativity:
After seven years of reflection in vain, the solution came to me suddenly with the thought that our concepts and laws of space and time can only claim validity insofar as they stand in a clear relation to our experiences; and that experience could very well lead to the alteration of these concepts and laws. By a revision of the concept of simultaneity into a more malleable form, I thus arrived at the special theory of relativity.
The circumstances surrounding Einstein’s revelation reveal another dimension to the notion of a break being the important part of a breakthrough. Making a break is one dimension, as we saw in Chapter 5. Taking a break—a time-out from the problem at hand—is the other dimension.
Einstein’s sudden insight is not the exception to the rule. Take a look at the following handful of stories by noteworthy individuals talking about the moment of their respective breakthroughs. As you read the memoirs, ask yourself what they all have in common.
Here is chemist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz on discovering the shape of the benzene ring in the mid-1800s:
I fell into a reverie, and lo, the atoms were gambolling before my eyes. I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gambolling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation: long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time I spent the rest of the night working out the consequences of the hypothesis.
Here is physicist Richard Feynman on coming up with a Nobel Prize–winning idea for quantum electrodynamics in 1946:
I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling. I had nothing to do, so I started to figure out the motion of the revolving plate. I went on to work out equations of wobbles. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was playing—working, really—with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things. It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.
Here is theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson on his seminal 1948 paper reconciling the conflicting theories of Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger:
I got onto a Greyhound bus and traveled nonstop for three days and nights as far as Chicago. This time I had nobody to talk to. The roads were too bumpy for me to read, and so I sat and looked out of the window and gradually fell into a comfortable stupor. As we were droning across Nebraska on the third day, something suddenly happened. For two weeks I had not thought about physics, and now it came bursting into my consciousness like an explosion. Feynman’s pictures and Schwinger’s equations began sorting themselves out in my head with a clarity they had never had before. For the first time I was able to put them all together. For an hour or two I arranged and rearranged the pieces. Then I knew how it all fitted. I had no pencil or paper, but everything was so clear I did not need to write it down. During the rest of the day as we watched the sun go down over the prairie, I was mapping out in my head the shape of the paper I would write when I got to Princeton.
Here is legendary designer Milton Glaser on coming up with the iconic “I NY” logo in 1977:
I send in my proposal [to the New York State Department of Commerce] and it’s approved. Everybody likes it. And if I were a normal person, I’d stop thinking about the project. But I can’t. Something about it just doesn’t feel right. I can’t get the damn problem out of my head. And then, about a week after the first concept was approved, I’m sitting in a cab, stuck in traffic. I often carry spare pieces of paper in my pocket, and so I get the paper out and I start to draw. And I’m thinking and drawing and then I get it. I see the whole design in my head. I see the typewriter typeface and the big round red heart smack-dab in the middle. I know that this is how it should go. Design is the conscious imposition of meaningful order. That sounds grandiose, but it’s just the process of taking an idea that isn’t clear and making it a little more clear. I could tell you a bullshit story about what exactly led to the idea, but the truth is that I don’t know. Maybe I saw a red heart out of the corner of my eye? Maybe I heard the word? But that’s the way it always works. You keep on trying to fix it, to make the design a little bit more interesting, a little bit better. And then, if you’re really stubborn and persistent and lucky, you eventually get there.
Here is author J. K. Rowling on the idea for Harry Potter:
In 1990, my then boyfriend and I decided to move up to Manchester together. It was after a weekend’s flat-hunting, when I was travelling back to London on my own on a crowded train, that the idea for Harry Potter simply fell into my head. I had been writing almost continuously since the age of six but I had never been so excited about an idea before. To my immense frustration, I didn’t have a functioning pen with me, and I was too shy to ask anybody if I could borrow one. I think, now, that this was probably a good thing, because I simply sat and thought, for four (delayed train) hours, and all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn’t know he was a wizard became more and more real to me. I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them (although sometimes I do wonder, idly, how much of what I imagined on that journey I had forgotten by the time I actually got my hands on a pen). I began to write “Philosopher’s Stone” that very evening.
In the fall of 2007 I was invited to the headquarters of 3M, which is just a few miles from downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, to speak to several different audiences about Toyota’s approach to innovation, learn about 3M’s approach to innovation, and tour the campus. 3M is one of the most innovative companies in the world, with as many products as employees, and has been for over 75 years. My sponsors gave me a wonderful book on the history of innovation at 3M, and upon arrival back at my home, I had two large boxes waiting for me, chock full of samples from the 3M product family: tapes, glues, cleaners, fasteners, sealants, and every size of Post-its I could hope to need. I still haven’t used them all.
Like most people, I knew the famous 3M story of Post-it Notes. Arthur Fry, the 3M engineer responsible for developing it, recalls his 1974 breakthrough this way in a 1990 radio interview:
It came one Sunday morning. I was singing in the church choir. I would get upset when pieces of paper that I would use as a bookmark would fall out of my music. I thought there must be a better way of making a bookmark. It was during a dull sermon, and my mind was wandering. I thought about a friend of mine [Spencer Silver] in our central research who had developed an adhesive. I went back to the laboratory the next morning and made samples of a bookmark. And then later on, in using one of these bookmarks as a note to my boss, he wrote the answer on it and stuck it on something he used to send it back me. During a coffee break we thought, “Aha! We don’t have just a bookmark, what we have is a whole systems approach!”
Although 3M is in the adhesive business—and has been since the early 1930s when researcher Richard Drew slapped some adhesive on the back of some DuPont cellophane to produce what we now call Scotch Tape—Arthur was not trying to invent the thing he invented. He, like Einstein and the others, was simply daydreaming.
What all these sudden insights have in common is that they came at strange times and places: in a streetcar, on a train or bus, while driving a car. They happened after an intense, prolonged struggle with a particular problem, followed by taking a break. They involved a change of scene and time away from the problem-solving activity.
Each involved a wandering mind, a distracted mind, a daydreaming mind—in reality, a calm and relaxed mind—a mind that those involved would say was doing nothing. That, of course, is not the case. As we now know and as was conclusively shown in 2009, it’s when we are engaged in a calming activity rather than wracking our brains over the problem at hand—exercising, driving, meditating, hiking, showering, dozing—that our brains do their best work. It’s when we’re not trying to think creatively that we’re often the most creative. That’s when a still mysterious process in the right hemisphere of the brain makes connections between seemingly unrelated things, and those connections then bubble up as sudden insights, as if out of nowhere.
Neuroscientists are learning more and more about the creative power of the wandering mind, experimenting with various states of relaxation, and studying the production of sudden insights while tracking brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG).
Several articles appearing in publications such as Scientific Mind helped me sort out and make sense out of the latest discoveries and what the results might imply for people wishing to tap into their natural creativity.
One science journalist concluded that Arthur Fry’s daydreaming was integral to his idea for Post-it Notes. The boring sermon set the stage for a daydream by allowing Fry to tune out and divert his attention elsewhere. It was Fry’s wandering mind that enabled him to make the connection between the problem of his makeshift bookmarks falling out of the hymnal and his colleague’s not-so-sticky adhesive.
The kind of thinking that enables these unexpected connections is thought to be the stuff of creativity, and people who daydream seem to be better at it than those who don’t or can’t. The trick, though, seems to be daydreaming and letting your mind wander yet remaining just aware enough to recognize a sudden insight when it comes. After all, what good is daydreaming if you don’t notice your aha moment when it hits? What researchers make clear is that it isn’t enough just to be a prolific daydreamer—it’s the ability to let your mind wander in such a way that you pay just enough attention to the problem at hand, but can still sense that instant when your daydreaming produces an insightful solution.
This more than anything is the fundamental characteristic of all those brilliant flashes of genius, from Einstein to Rowling to Fry. Yes, they were all daydreaming. But all noticed the connection when it appeared.
What that means is that not all daydreaming is created equal. Sitting around the house all day in one long protracted daydream won’t produce any insights unless there was a certain density of attention paid to a specific problem that preceded it. It’s dedicated daydreaming—purposeful mind wandering—that yields productive creativity.
In other words, there’s science and art to daydreaming. Science first.
The science of daydreaming is not exactly new. In fact, it’s been 20 years since Washington University neurologist Marcus Raichle noticed something strange and surprising during a study of visual perception using an fMRI scanner: the brain activity of the participants during the breaks between tasks was extraordinarily high, just the opposite of what you’d assume would be the case for a brain at rest. And it wasn’t just worthless noise; it was the brain’s creativity center in the frontal cortex that was all lit up. As Raichle tells it: “When you don’t use a muscle, that muscle isn’t doing much. But when your brain is supposedly doing nothing, it’s really doing a tremendous amount.”
Within a few years after his discovery, Raichle was able to determine why our brains get so busy when we’re absentmindedly doing nothing: it’s our default mental state. In other words, a wandering mind may be something hardwired into our mental machinery. It turns out that our default state is most engaged when we’re doing something that doesn’t require much conscious attention: driving, staring off into space, daydreaming. What Raichle’s fMRI studies showed conclusively was that during the absentminded default state previously assumed to be one of mental dormancy, the brain is in fact at its most creative.
In his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel Kahn-eman labels our default mental state as “System 1.” System 1 is a quick, reflexive, effortless, unconscious, and intuitive network. In fact, Raichle termed it the “default network.” Kahneman says that System 2 is a slow, labored, effortful, conscious, and analytic network. System 1 handles the routine tasks that don’t require much attention, while System 2 handles higher-level, complex problem solving. Most researchers refer to Kahneman’s System 2 as our executive network.
Until just recently, though, researchers thought that the two operated on an either-or basis; the brain’s default network was the only part of the brain thought to be active when our minds wander. But a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by cognitive neuroscientist Kalina Christoff sheds new and profound light on the subject. Dr. Christoff placed subjects inside an fMRI scanner, where they performed the mindless task of repeatedly pushing a button. In other words, she activated the default network by letting boredom produce wandering minds. She then tracked performance on the task as well as moment-to-moment attentiveness. The default network’s activity was high, as expected. The surprise, though, was that the brain fMRI scans also showed high executive network activity. The whole brain was engaged.
“This is a surprising finding, that these two brain networks are activated in parallel,” says Dr. Christoff. “People assumed that when your mind wandered, it was empty. But this study shows our brains are very active when we daydream. Mind wandering is a much more active state than we ever imagined, much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem. When you daydream, you may not be achieving your immediate goal—say, reading a book or paying attention in class—but your mind may be taking that time to address more important questions in your life.”
The idea that people struggling to solve complicated problems might be better off switching to a simpler task and letting their mind wander is a monumentally important one; by most estimates we spend a third of our waking lives daydreaming.
“You can see regions of these networks becoming active just prior to people arriving at an insight,” Dr. Christoff says. The implication is that an unfocused mind may make surprising connections more effectively than does a mind engaged in methodical reasoning and thus create the mental framework for new and creative ideas. But it’s not just that when the mind wanders in a daydream that the two networks work in unison. It’s that it may be the only time.
So what is it about a purposefully daydreaming, dedicated wandering mind that is different from an intensely focused analytic mind?
For over 30 years, researchers have linked creativity with low-frequency brain waves known as alpha waves. Alpha waves are slow waves, under 12 hertz (Hz), and indicate a relaxed but aware brain. They are the brain waves of a daydreaming, wandering mind.
Colin Martindale of the University of Maine used a series of electroencephalographic studies in the late 1970s to show that highly creative people exhibit more alpha wave activity during creative tasks than do less creative people. Martindale suggested that higher alpha wave activity indicated defocused attention and less inhibition, meaning that creative people were allowing more unedited information into their conscious awareness during creative work. A research team led by Andreas Fink at the University of Graz in Austria recently replicated Martindale’s findings but has a different interpretation: the increased alpha wave activity indicates that the brain is focusing internally rather than on the outside world.
In 2009, I briefly introduced readers of In Pursuit of Elegance to the work of Mark Beeman, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University who had demonstrated by using fMRI the actual brain wave differences in the two different networks. Volunteers who had a moment of sudden insight when solving a series of anagrams showed a burst of fast brain waves of over 40 Hz—known as gamma waves—right around the aha moment. Preceding the gamma waves, however, was a resting state of slower alpha waves. Beeman’s conclusion was that it’s a quiet mind that sets the stage and gives rise to breakthrough moments. But the data from fMRI weren’t as clean as he wanted.
More recently, Beeman teamed with psychologist John Kounios of Drexel University to publish a study in which they pinpointed the precise moment of the gamma burst. They used both fMRI and the faster EEG to scan brain patterns of subjects engaged in solving word-association problems. (For example: What word can form a compound word with all three of the following words: crab, pine, sauce?)
Subjects signaled when they had the answer and whether they got the solution through methodical trial-and-error or it suddenly popped into their heads. As in previous studies, the sudden insighters all displayed prolonged alpha waves first, followed by a right hemisphere gamma wave burst three milliseconds—a lifetime in brain speed—before the aha moment. The insighters simply knew the answer and had no doubts about it. (The answer, by the way, is apple.)
Those who took the more analytic approach did not exhibit the same alpha wave prologue or the gamma wave burst and didn’t experience the exhilarating revelation. Beeman and Kounios concluded that alpha activity focuses attention inward, whereas the gamma burst coincides with the sudden arrival of the solution in conscious awareness. The other interesting thing they found was that the gamma burst was usually preceded by a change in alpha wave intensity in the part of the brain that controls vision, evidence that right before a sudden insight, the brain was doing its own version of what we do when we want to concentrate: we close our eyes.
Psychologist Joydeep Bhattacharya of the University of London’s Goldsmiths College published a study in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience showing alpha and gamma brain wave patterns that allowed him to identify whether a person would have a sudden insight up to eight seconds before it actually happened.
Bhattacharya’s conclusion is the strongest: without sufficient alpha wave activity, there simply will be no aha moment.
That brings us to the art of purposeful daydreaming: how do we go about producing higher levels of alpha waves? There are several ways, and what follows will conclude our tour of the laws of subtraction.
Chapter 5 introduced the Zen principle of datsuzoku, which refers to a break with convention and routine. The Zen aesthetic principle of seijaku (say-JAH-koo) deals with the content of datsuzoku. To a Zen practitioner, it is in states of active calm, tranquillity, solitude, and quietude that we find the essence of creative energy. It seems the Zen masters got there long before neuroscientists did. Perhaps that’s why Buddhist “adepts”—those with over 10,000 hours of mindful meditation to their name—are one of the most studied groups: they exhibit abnormally high levels of alpha waves.
What’s interesting about all the cognitive neuroscientific findings is the central paradox at play. The actual right brain process responsible for our aha moments remains unknown. All we know is that we cannot speed up the sudden insight-manufacturing process or somehow push it to work harder or more intensely. We can only let go, tune out as it were, and find that Zen place where the alpha waves flow. We need to take a break, relax, stop thinking, and do nothing while remaining aware that we are doing so. We need to learn how to purposefully do nothing.
There is another aspect to the paradox. It’s not just that we need to be in a relaxed and unfocused state of mind in order to let the brain make its creative connections at its own pace. It’s that if we don’t or can’t release our focus, if we insist on maintaining an analytical stranglehold on the problem, if we can’t redirect our attention from an outward direction to a more inward one, we may actually block those creative connections from ever being made. At the very least, we will inhibit our ability to recognize an insight once a connection is made.
In other words, not only is doing something not always better than doing nothing, it can make matters worse. The irony is that trying to be creative might only make us less so. The implication is significant, because it reverses ages of organizational thinking that assumes the best way to achieve a creative breakthrough is to lock ourselves in a room for hours at a time and brainstorm over the details of the problem we’re trying to solve. Focusing intently that way inadvertently denies the brain the break it needs to manufacture creative insights.
And therein lies the catch. As the consultants in the Boston Consulting Group time-out experiment revealed, we’re reluctant to take those breaks. Certainly we don’t include them or build them in as a formal part of our problem-solving efforts. Yes, many companies now follow the policy that 3M originated (yes, 3M, not Google) and institutionalized of encouraging people to devote 15 to 20 percent of their time to working on new ideas that interest them. But that is datsuzoku, not seijaku. Arthur Fry’s sudden insight about sticky notes did not occur during that time, although he did use that time in the ensuing months to develop the idea fully.
There are at least two reasons we don’t take time out more often. The first is fear. Stepping away from our work is counterintuitive. It somehow feels wrong, like preemptive surrender. It’s scary to ease up, because we think that we may lose our momentum and that if we take our eye off the problem even for a second, we may lose the energy we’ve invested. But the result is that we get anxious when the solution to whatever we’re struggling with remains elusive, and it’s easy to start doubting our creativity, our abilities, and even our intelligence: “I’m obviously stupid because I can’t figure this out.”
That’s the cue to take a break, but we still don’t because of the second reason: we don’t know how. We haven’t practiced enough to develop a reliable and comfortable way to productively tune out and quiet our minds.
That’s the art of seijaku, and there are a variety of ways to do it.
Executives at GE, 3M, Bloomberg, Green Mountain Coffee, and Salesforce.com do it. Google teaches a course in it at Google University. Ford chairman William Ford does it, as do former corporate chiefs Bill George of Medtronic and Bob Shapiro of Monsanto. Phil Jackson and Tiger Woods do it. Oracle chief Larry Ellison does it and asks his executives to do it several times a day. Chip Conley, founder of Joie de Vivre hotels and author of Emotional Equations, does it. Thomas Edison did it. The “it” is mindful meditation.
According to Bill George, now a Harvard leadership professor and bestselling author, meditation has been an integral part of his career. He meditates twice a day and during his tenure as Medtronic’s CEO designated one of the company’s conference rooms for mental breaks, encouraging employees to give meditation a try. Google in 2007 initiated a mindfulness and meditation course at Google University, encouraging employees to use the practice to increase self-awareness, focus, and attention.
New research from the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging suggests that people who meditate show more gray matter in certain regions of the brain, show stronger connections between brain regions, and show less age-related brain atrophy. In other words, meditation may make your brain bigger, faster, and younger.
The researchers used a type of brain imaging known as diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a relatively new imaging mode that provides insights into the structural connectivity of the brain. According to lead researcher Eileen Luders, herself a meditator, “Meditation appears to be a powerful mental exercise with the potential to change the physical structure of the brain at large. Meditation might not only cause changes in brain anatomy by inducing growth but also by preventing reduction.”
If you want to get started with meditation, read the contribution by Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz at the end of the chapter.
Not everyone can meditate. Neurofeedback training is another way to learn to quiet the mind. It worked for Italy’s 2006 World Cup championship team, notorious for its constant presence in the secret mind room.
Neurofeedback training uses EEG. EEG works by detecting electrical signals given by brain waves, all of which have different wavelengths and frequencies. Neurofeedback works the way almost any feedback mechanism works, whether a mirror, a videotape of your performance, or even a live audience: your actions get fed back to you so that you can adjust accordingly. In this case, you can see and hear in real time what’s going on between your mind and your brain through the images on the computer screen and the music that’s being played, all of which corresponds to the various types of brain waves you’re generating. Your brain then learns to improve the management of these states. Once these new developmental skills are learned, they eventually become automatic, like riding a bike or trying out shoes—no thinking required.
The underlying philosophy is the same as that behind mindful meditation—indirectly influencing the physical connections in the brain by directing the mind—but using a bit of technology as a guide. Here, by training your brain to a resting state, you not only set yourself up to more automatically find the zone but also set the stage for the kind of creative insights that result in an aha moment.
Pulsing is the simplest and easiest and most immediate way to build breaks into your day: work in 90-minute cycles separated by short breaks. Go for a walk, change the scene, exercise, doodle, listen to music that relaxes you, shower (if that’s an option)—anything that has a renewal effect on you and gives you the feeling of a second wind, even if you think you don’t need it. You do.
The late physiologist Nathaniel Kleitman, who discovered rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and correlated it with dreaming and brain activity, showed that we move through five stages of light to deep sleep in recurring 90-minute periods. These are “ultradian” cycles, and they have a parallel in our waking life: when we’re awake, we move from higher to lower alertness every 90 minutes. After working at high intensity for more than 90 minutes, our brains begin to shut down. We become more reactive and less capable of thinking clearly and reflectively or seeing the big picture.
And here’s the thing: our bodies clearly signal that rhythm in the form of restlessness, hunger, drowsiness, and loss of focus. Generally we either ignore or override those signals because we have a lot to do and many ways to artificially pump up our energy with various supplements. But that just defeats the purpose: mind quieting.
The psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, known for his research and theories on expertise, points out that top performers in fields ranging from music to science to sports tend to work in approximately 90-minute cycles and then take a break.
We are designed to pulse, to move between spending and renewing energy. Taking time to renew every 90 minutes keeps the body in alignment with its natural rhythms.
Sometimes the antidote to a chatterbox brain is a short retreat from the workaday world, combining datsuzoku and seijaku.
Since the Wall Street Journal revealed it in 2005, Bill Gates’s “Think Week”—the twice-yearly solitary sabbatical at a secret hideaway taken by the Microsoft chairman—has become legendary. Bill takes a helicopter or seaplane to a tiny but tidy two-story, one-bedroom clapboard cottage on a quiet waterfront somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. No visitors are allowed, including friends, family, and colleagues. The only outsider he sees is the caretaker, who brings him two simple meals each day.
“He starts the morning in bed poring through papers mostly by Microsoft engineers, executives, and product managers and scribbling notes on the covers,” writes WSJ reporter Robert Guth, the first and only journalist ever allowed into the secret location. “Skipping breakfast, he patters upstairs in his stocking feet to read more papers. Noon and dinnertime bring him back downstairs to read papers over meals at the kitchen table, where he has a view of the Olympic Mountains. His main staple for the week is a steady stream of Diet Orange Crush.” The setting is quiet and peaceful and allows Gates to relax and unwind, all the while filling his mind with information and ideas.
Writer Caitlin Kelly found new insights into her life and relationship by going on an eight-day silent Buddhist retreat with her husband, Jose, a devout follower of Dzogchen, an esoteric and austere form of Tibetan Buddhism. Held at a former Catholic monastery high on the eastern shore of the Hudson River and overlooking West Point, it was his birthday gift to her—a strange one at that, given that Caitlin is as religious as Jose is, but of the Episcopalian persuasion. Each day was devoted to attaining rigpa—awareness—with the goal of silence being to shut out the world and enable a deeper resonance with the daily Buddhist teachings, meditations, and yoga. Additional prohibitions included technology of any kind.
“The point of the retreat was to break habits and examine the emotional and physical crutches we rely on,” said Caitlin. “Such profound silence was at first shocking but soon became deeply soothing. The noises of normal life disappeared: ringing phones, someone’s leaky earbuds, the clicking of computer keys, the screech of bus brakes. I wasn’t obsessed with toxic minutiae of the news or mindless television. Hours consumed by Facebook were replaced by lectures on how to sharpen one’s sense of awareness. Surprisingly, I loved it. As the retreat ended, I felt regret. I loved our temporary reprieve from the social reflexes of everyday life. But I really felt the retreat’s effects in the weeks afterward…. We experienced an earthquake and a hurricane, which normally would have sent me over the edge. But now, when I’m stressed, I take several long, deep, slow breaths. And it works.”
Cognitive research shows that familiarity can stifle creativity, and it is when we distance ourselves from our most pressing problems and our usual stomping grounds that the imagination fires up. One way to achieve that distance is to travel for extended periods.
A 2009 study published by the American Psychological Association demonstrated that the longer MBA students at the Kellogg School of Management had spent living abroad, the more likely they were to solve the famous 1945 Duncker candle problem, considered to be a measure of creative insight.
According to the study, the kind of creative problem solving required for adapting to another culture and generating a new social identity produces new neural connections in the brain, yielding new psychological associations.
Long walks and hikes are the preferred method of psychologist Jonathan Schooler, who runs the META Lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and who helped pioneer the study of daydreaming and the wandering mind. Schooler takes a dedicated daydreaming walk every day on the beautiful bluffs above the Pacific Ocean, just north of Santa Barbara, and says he always knows when he desperately needs a daydreaming walk: when the problem seems impossible to solve, when there’s no feeling of knowing, and no sense of progress.
A recent study confirms that walking promotes the connections we call creativity: our two brain networks working in tandem to produce new insights. The study was led by University of Illinois psychologist Art Kramer and followed 65 adults who joined a walking group or a stretching and toning group for a year. All the participants were sedentary before the study, reporting less than two episodes of physical activity lasting 30 minutes or more in the previous six months. Rather than focusing on specific brain structures, the study looked at the brain activity occurring in the default and executive networks. The researchers measured the participants’ brain connectivity and performance on cognitive tasks at the beginning of the study, six months later, and after a year of either walking or toning and stretching.
At the end of the year, connectivity in the default network—which you’ll recall dominates our daydreaming mode—was significantly improved in the brains of the walkers but not in the stretching and toning group’s brains. The walkers also had increased connectivity in the executive network, which you’ll recall handles complex analytic work, performing significantly better on cognitive tests.
At the University of Lübeck in Germany, neuroendocrinologist Ullrich Wagner has demonstrated that the ultimate break—sleep—increases the likelihood of creative insights. In one experiment, he gave volunteers some Mensa-style number sequences to solve, along with two logical rules to use in manipulating them to find the pattern. But there was a single, simpler “hidden” rule that they might discover as they worked through the sequences. The subjects were allowed to practice several times with the rules and then told to take a break. Some took naps; some didn’t. Upon returning to the experiment to continue doing problems, those who had taken a nap found the hidden rule much more often than did those who hadn’t.
Wagner believes what all neuroscientists do: the quiet mind enables the brain to clear itself and in effect reboot, all the while forming new connections and associations.
This one needs no explanation, which is good, because I could find no research on the subject.
What happens if you don’t or can’t learn to let go, to calm and quiet your mind through a technique such as those just discussed? What if you aren’t able to effectively do nothing when you really need to?
The scientific answer is that your executive network (Kahneman’s System 2)—will take over. Your free-flowing default network (Kahneman’s System 1) will take a back seat. What was easy and effortless will become forced and labored. Because your executive function is your impulse and inhibition control center, it can absolutely handcuff you if you can’t quiet it on command.
In other words, you’ll suffocate your creativity. You’ll be so worried about making a mistake, you’ll cease to perform. Jana Novotna should know. In 1993, she lost the Wimbledon women’s final to Steffi Graf on the hundredth anniversary of that final in just this way.
It has gone down in sports history as “the Choke.” On the muggy but breezy afternoon of July 4, 1993, Jana found herself five points from taking the crown from the reigning Wimbledon queen, Steffi, who had won four of the last five titles, including the two previous ones. Everything was going her way, and she could do no wrong, or so it seemed. And then she double-faulted, sending both serves into the net. She missed a fairly routine volley on the next exchange. At game point, she dumped an overhead smash into the net. Steffi took the next game easily, and Jana seemed rattled, so much so that she allowed Steffi to win the next game after being up by two points. She was still ahead, but everyone watching could see that her body language had changed from confident belief to head-hanging defeat. She was a completely different player from the one she had been just two games earlier.
What happened next stunned the crowd: Jana hit six straight service faults into the net. Everyone could see her talking to herself, shaking her head, berating herself. Her movements seemed stiff, off balance, and slow. Some remarked that she looked like an absolute beginner as she missed easy shot after easy shot, losing to Steffi 4–6.
It wasn’t nerves. Jana was no rookie, having won the doubles title on two previous occasions: 1989 and 1990. She had upset Gabriela Sabatini and Martina Navratilova on the same court just days before.
As the duchess of Kent handed her the second place trophy at the awards ceremony, a visibly distraught Novotna burst into tears and cried on the shoulder of the duchess, who tried to comfort her.
The most telling comment was by Steffi Graf, who told journalists afterward, “It’s a human brain and so difficult to train, you know, to prepare it.”
We each face our own charging hippo every bit as deadly as those Boyd Matson handles easily by doing nothing. It comes in a different form to each of us yet is marked by its excessive, confusing, wasteful, unnatural, hazardous, hard-to-use, or ugly features. It is ubiquitous, voracious, and relentless. Learning what it means to stand still in the face of it is no easy matter. But perhaps we make matters far worse than they need to be. Perhaps the way to win in this age of excess everything is simply to learn to get out of our own way.
That more than anything else may be the ultimate act of subtraction.
JEFFREY SCHWARTZ
BILL JENSEN
TONY SCHWARTZ
DAVID SHERWIN
JEFF UNGER
KEVIN MEYER
JONATHAN KAY
PLEASE FIND THIS
I meditate daily for one hour without fail. I’ve been involved in mindful meditation for over 30 years. I recommend it highly. To get started, here are the original Buddhist instructions.
Sit still in a chair in a quiet room for 20 minutes and just watch yourself breathe. Pick a time and a place when you can be reasonably sure no one will interrupt you. Close the door to minimize outer distractions. Sit comfortably in a chair or cross-legged on the floor with your hands resting in your lap. You can close your eyes, or you can keep them open but unfocused. Place your attention on the inner rim of your nostrils, where you can feel the subtle movement of air as you breathe in and out.
Now “watch” your breathing go in, go out, go in, go out. Make a mental note for each in breath and out breath like this: “breathing in,” breathing out.” Or just “in” and “out.” Try to be aware of the entire in breath from the time it starts to the time it stops. This is the time to make the mental note “breathing in,” if that’s your choice of terms. Don’t worry about the exact words; it’s the process of observing yourself that’s critical. Then try to be aware of the entire out breath from the time it starts to the time it stops. This is the time to make the mental note “breathing out.”
If you suddenly notice that your mind has wandered away from your breathing, just make a mental note of that, for example, “wandering, wandering,” or “thinking, thinking,” or “imagining, imagining.” Then gently bring your attention back to an in breath or out breath and continue observing and making mental notes of those observations.
Jeffrey Schwartz is a neuropsychiatrist affiliated with UCLA and is the coauthor of several books, including You Are Not Your Brain, Brain Lock, and The Mind and the Brain.
When it comes to relationships, my subtraction skills absolutely suck. It’s an epic fail. The reason is simple: throughout my life I have tried to make too many relationships work long past their expiration dates.
As a boss, there have been several times when I should have let someone go long before he or she heard the umpteenth warning. I just couldn’t. “There’s so much potential here,” I justified. There have been scores of creative partnerships, alliances, and projects that fell flat because I stayed with “Can’t we work this out?” for far too long.
Loyalty is a most amazing quality. Except when it isn’t.
During your career, you will have hundreds, perhaps thousands, of relationships. If you’re lucky, most of them not only will help you get the job done, they also will enhance who you are as a person. You won’t want to let them go. Even with that good luck, a few of them will still be stinkers. The stinkers are the ones that don’t deserve you and what you have to offer.
The wisdom we all need is in a poem called “A Reason, a Season, and a Lifetime,” attributed to Brian A. Chalker:
People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. When you figure out which it is, you know exactly what to do.
For the bosses and jobs that are stinkers or that provide only short-term value to you, don’t whine and don’t give less than your best. Do your best but figure out what lesson you were there to learn. There’s always at least one. Learn it. Internalize it. Treasure it. Then thank those involved and move on, grateful for what you’ve learned.
For the bosses and jobs and teammates you would love to hang on to forever, realize that our role as humans is to grow. And growing usually means letting go of something that you’ve been holding on to for a while.
Letting go means creating room for new lessons, new opportunities. Whenever I let go—each and every time—I find that something or someone new and wonderful is waiting for me.
Bill Jensen (simplerwork.com) is author of Simplicity and a coauthor of Hacking Work.
For nearly a decade now, I’ve begun my workdays by focusing for 90 minutes, uninterrupted, on the task I decide the night before is the most important one I’ll face the next day. After 90 minutes, I take a break.
To make this possible, I turn off my e-mail while I’m working, close all the windows on my computer, and let the phone go to voice mail if it rings. I typically get more work done during those 90 minutes and feel more satisfied with my output than I do for any comparable period of time the rest of the day. It can be tough on some days to fully focus for 90 minutes, but I always have a clear stopping time, which makes it easier.
I launched this practice because I long ago discovered that my energy, my will, and my capacity for intense focus diminish as the day wears on. Anything really challenging that I put off tends not to get done, and it’s the most difficult work that tends to generate the greatest enduring value.
I first made this discovery while writing a book. At the time, I’d written three previous books. For each one, I’d dutifully sit down at my desk at 7 a.m., and I’d often stay there until 7 p.m. Looking back, I probably spent more time avoiding writing than I did actually writing. Instead, I spent an inordinate amount of time and energy making lists, responding to e-mail, answering the phone, and keeping my desk clean and my files incredibly well organized. There were days I never got to writing at all. It was incredibly frustrating.
At the heart of my work at The Energy Project is helping people and organizations build highly precise, deliberate practices done at specific times so that they eventually become automatic and don’t require much expenditure of energy or self-discipline, akin to brushing your teeth at night.
It was this approach that I applied to the book I was writing and at other times to whatever I happened to be working on. The effect on my efficiency has been staggering. I wrote my fourth book in less than half the time I had invested in any of the three previous ones.
I don’t get it right every day, but this single practice of working in 90-minute cycles—pulsing—has been life-changing for me. Try it for one week. Let me know what you discover.
I think you’ll be amazed.
Tony Schwartz (tonyschwartz.com) is the president and CEO of The Energy Project (theenergy project.com) and the author of Be Excellent at Anything.
I was traveling through central Japan on a brief sabbatical from my work as a designer. But being a designer is something that one cannot easily escape. Everywhere I go, I long to reshape what’s around me into some new and improved—albeit imagined—form.
While riding the Tokyo subway, I could not stop myself from filling my notebook with ideas for all sorts of things that would help those sleepy-eyed salarymen, such as briefcases that doubled as pillows and fit perfectly into the seat gaps on the green JR Line and a series of vending machines that would sanitize and refill bottles with drinks commuters could carry and reuse on their daily commute, saving millions of plastic bottles and aluminum cans from being produced and recycled. Of course, I was not naive enough to believe that the latter innovation would be accepted without cultural friction.
Design is work. Thinking about design is work. Pondering what should be thought about in order to design is work. Back at home, while I was cutting vegetables for a stir-fry dinner, gears continued to whir in my mind regarding the problems my masters had set before me. It wasn’t until I’d been meditating for some time that I understood on a fundamental level how work—and its analog design—is closely intertwined with thought and reflection.
As a designer, I have spent an increasing amount of time observing others. This includes my clients as they wrestle with difficult business problems; my subjects as I guide them through usability tests, empathizing with their frustration and delight; and my colleagues as they cast off failure after failure in search of the most elegant solution to a thorny design challenge.
Observation, however, is not work. It is direct experience, which does not necessarily require a critical eye to appreciate. “What can be met with recognition is not realization itself, because realization is not reached with a discriminating mind,” the Zen master Dogen once wrote.
In our busy lives, it is often a struggle to tease out the act of observation from that of reflection (thinking and pondering). In practice, we routinely skip reflection to arrive at a design idea in one lightning-fast gesture. But the germ of the idea is always the observation; that is what leads to genesis.
Glimmers of great ideas usually emerge from seeing the relationships between seemingly disparate things without distraction.
David Sherwin (changeorder.typepad.com) is the principal designer at frog design and the author of Creative Workshop and Success by Design. He adapted this from his Design Mind article “Zen and the Art of Design.”
When I was a new lawyer, my boss and mentor (and later my friend) used to irritate me by giving me Yoda-like words of wisdom—some obvious, some not so much. Now, almost 20 years later, I realize how lucky I was to have had a mentor like him and how valuable his lessons were.
One of the most irritating bits of advice was “Sometimes the hardest thing to do is nothing at all.”
The first time I heard that was in the middle of a late-night closing of a $50 million transaction. The lender imposed some last-minute conditions, which were frustrating to our client. The client wanted me to browbeat the lender into submission (as if a newly minted lawyer in San Diego could have that sort of impact on a career finance lawyer in Manhattan). I went into my boss’s office for advice and help to work up my ire sufficiently to call the other lawyer. My mentor listened, reclined in his aged chair, and said, “Sometimes the hardest thing to do is nothing at all.”
That’s literally all he said. I left the office thinking, What the hell is he talking about?! I went home, my head spinning.
Well, the next morning, the lender had changed its position entirely. I had done nothing, and my client thought I was an amazing hotshot young lawyer. Over the next few years, that client and I developed a great friendship as I worked on about a billion dollars of transactions for him.
Did my mentor think through this strategically and know that the lender’s attorney would have to change his position? I thought so.
Years later, I realized that he didn’t have any special insight at all. There was no strategic thinking. There was no crystal ball. He had just learned over several decades as a lawyer that people sometimes change their minds and that although it was possible that I would have to eventually deal with the objectionable term, it was also possible that it might go away on its own. He simply had the maturity, experience, and wisdom I didn’t at the time.
More than 20 years later, I realize that the best legal tactic is frequently doing absolutely nothing. Too frequently, lawyers are ready to charge, pick up the phone, fire off an e-mail or a letter, and forget that doing absolutely nothing might be a viable tactic to consider.
Simple advice but never easy to hear or take.
Jeffrey Unger is the founder of eMinutes.com, a law practice with the simple mission of being the world’s best option for forming and maintaining small businesses.
I’m one of those folks who can’t resist an idea, and I get a lot of them. I simply don’t understand the concept of boredom. For years I’d chase every idea to see where it might lead. Before long I was juggling dozens of them.
Throw in my job of running a company and a chaotic family medical situation that prevents planning more than a week in advance and you’ve got a recipe for some sort of breakdown.
I was on the verge of one of those a few years back, so I did something a bit radical: I hopped a plane to Hawaii for three days, leaving everyone and everything behind. I figured a couple of days of wind and waves and sun could rebalance the soul. My wife supported my decision.
On that first escape I spent time catching up on projects, working on my laptop by the pool until the battery died and then sitting on the beach while it charged. Evening was more of the same. Catching up created temporary space, peace, and balance.
I began escaping to Hawaii about every four months, always at the last minute, when I knew the family medical situation was temporarily stable. Although the first trip focused on catching up, later trips became more about personal meditation and reflection.
What I realized over time was that the time-outs helped remove the distraction and replace it with focus. I relished the break from the routine, being accountable only to myself, the quietude, and solitude. Being close to nature calmed the senses and quieted the mind.
Once I realized that I was becoming more effective by removing distraction, I began to apply that concept every day. I have the most beautiful commute in the world: a few miles up the scenic Pacific Coast Highway and then down a windy empty road through vineyards and avocado fields. In the past I would crank the music or listen to news. Now I commute in silence, allowing my thoughts and ideas to develop, prioritize, and settle. On the commute into work I plan the day, especially the two or three key tasks that must get done. On the commute home I reflect on how the day went and how it could have been improved.
Taking a break helps promote mindfulness. That mindfulness helps organize and prioritize thoughts and projects, leading to less juggling. Less juggling promotes peace and balance and thus effectiveness.
Kevin Meyer (kevinmeyer.com) is the former president of a medical device manufacturer and the author of Beachfront Leading.
I’ve always liked talking. I’m good at it. So when I started in business, I figured I’d go into sales, get people to listen to me talk, and get them to buy stuff. But it was the worst. Selling required me to completely remove myself from the picture. The company I worked for didn’t want me to be myself. They had a formula, and if you followed it, you got the results they wanted.
I literally stopped selling and left the company. As my business life went on, I vowed I wouldn’t ever sell. But I kept talking, helping create “buzz” for companies, and got a reputation for promoting people and businesses without selling.
A woman organizing a big conference reached out to me to be a speaker. When she asked me how much I charged for speaking, I thought, I don’t ever charge for speaking. I think when someone pays you to speak, you can’t be totally you and say exactly what you want; you have to say something they want to hear. When you speak for free, you’re free of that; you’re doing it because you love the content. I do, anyway.
But I needed the money for a new business I was starting. So I wrote an e-mail to her saying I didn’t charge for speaking, I loved to talk about creating buzz, and I wouldn’t even feel genuine about it anymore because I was being paid.
Her response was, “Oh, my gosh, how are you this honest? I’m going to make sure no matter what that you get paid!” I had to laugh. I hadn’t sold; I had told the unvarnished truth.
It was the opposite of selling, and I ended up getting the money anyway. And that’s been my whole approach to business: figuring out how can I do something for someone with no sales implication and truly believe something good will happen.
Sometimes when you hope but don’t ask for something, that something comes to you simply because you believe in what you’re doing.
And I’ve learned the right way, a constructive way, to remove myself from the picture. I’ve learned to listen, stand outside myself to listen, truly listen, to feedback, to criticism, without having a comeback or a preconceived notion of a response. If you’re formulating a response while someone’s telling you something, you can’t be objective.
Yin and yang, right? All very Zen: removing the ask and making sure the real me is in the picture while making sure I’m not in the picture so I can listen and learn on the other.
Jonathan Kay is the founder and chief operating officer of Apptopia.com, a marketplace designed to help broker the sale of mobile apps.
The Leftovers
I made myself from all the love you no longer wanted.
One of the first things you’re taught in design school, if it’s at all halfway decent, is that you should take away absolutely everything you do not need. That’s what’s meant by the phrase “form follows function”; it means don’t design or create things to look pretty or add things that don’t need to be there.
Things look beautiful and have a natural emotional ergo-nomic when you strip them to their core and only their essence remains. When things become too complicated, you lose your audience. You might ask, but what about Jackson Pollock? His paintings are incredibly complex. Yes, there is nothing else but the idea of complexity in his paintings.
My best-known online artwork, I Wrote This for You —a collaborative, international, minimal, anonymous prose and photography project that became a popular book—has no name on it or any other traditional identity features in it, yet thousands of people relate to it every day. (It doesn’t even have a copyright symbol.)
They step into the picture to fill the space I’ve left by stepping out of it. They step into the frame in an intensely personal way that only they could, given their individuality.
If it has taught me anything, it’s that if you can find something you’re good at and you can be focused enough to remove all the distractions around it, including your ego, you will shine. And people will be attracted to that kind of light.
Stay out of the way of whatever you’re trying to accomplish.
pleasefindthis (iwrotethisforyou.me) is an award-winning new media artist and the bestselling author of I Wrote This for You, based in South Africa.