Looking for inspiration? Do this.
Looking for inspiration? Do this.
One of the best things we can do for our creativity is take a break. It fuels your mind, rejuvenates your body, unblocks your thinking: It's the secret to solving more problems than everyone else.
When I was in my early 20s, I was so amazingly fit. It wasn’t because I spent a lot of time at the gym. Quite the opposite. I was a lead developer working about 15 hours a day on my second big startup.
It was the early 90’s and our fledgeling company had rented out a house in Hillsboro, California. It’s a gorgeous spot up in the hills, and the house was amazing — a hillside rustic bungalow with 5 bedrooms, and a deck that looked out over south San Francisco. At night we’d sit out on that deck, eating home-made black bean chili, drinking beer, and watching a string of jumbo jets on approach to SFO.
We’d also talk a lot of shop. Some of our most challenging problems found their solutions on that deck.
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The black bean chili was Bob’s secret recipe. He was our “sales guy,” the only one of us that wasn’t a programmer. The other five, we were cranking out Objective C and Sybase code, building the next greatest thing — a way of intuitively managing all the information, all the metadata, all the files on your computer. Digital document management.
It was pretty neat, for that era. Remember, this was pre-world wide web. It was almost pre-internet! I remember the internet as being there, but not really being used unless you were very technical. Sure, programmers all had email addresses. You could connect computers directly to each other (the most common reason being to send email). But things weren’t so connected and information management was still in its infancy. We still went to the bookshelf when we needed to look up an algorithm.
So anyhow, our great idea was to annotate all those files on your hard disk with more information. Things like where a document came from, its provenance, who was responsible for it, and who needed to approve it. We were just hitting on ideas like workflow management — the idea that a computer could actually automate how a document flows through an organization.
The platform was NeXT (you might think of it as today’s OS/X precursor). We were creating something brand new. It was fun times.12
And then… I’d get stuck
Building applications in those days was hard. In some ways, harder than it is today. I think it’s because we had to solve so many things ourselves — like I said, no world wide web. If the answer wasn’t on the bookshelf, we had to find it or invent it ourselves.
There were afternoons when I would literally drive to the NeXT campus in Mountain View to talk with engineers about what we needed. Or send off an email, and hope an answer came back the same day. It’s not that email was that slow, it’s just we weren’t carrying it around in our pockets yet.
And often, after sending off that email, I’d take a break.
I mentioned the Hillsboro house. It was on the side of a mountain, with that fantastic view — and lots of twisty little roads. Great for riding a bike, which is exactly what I did whenever I needed to think. Whenever I was looking for creativity.
Some days, I took 2 or 3 rides. The hill was steep, and the rides often challenging. With all the tough problems we had to solve — that was a lot of time riding, thinking, and getting fit.
That’s why I was so amazingly fit in my 20’s.
But something else happened too — after those rides, I had lots of new ideas. It really made the creativity flow.
It’s why I was the lead developer. I solved the tough problems, and cranked out the most features.
The science behind creativity
It turns out there’s science that tells us taking a break actually increases creativity. In her 2017 TED talk, Marily Oppezzo explains: “We actually ran four studies… and all of these studies found the same conclusion.” She goes on to show how taking a short walk dramatically increases creative idea generation.3
In fact, based on the cited studies, people that went for a walk while thinking about an idea were nearly twice as creative as someone just sitting and trying to solve the problem.
That’s a lot of new ideas.
Here are a few tips that Marily Oppezzo suggests we use to get the most benefit:
Pick a problem or a topic that you want to brainstorm.
Walk or do some other activity that doesn’t require a lot of attention while you brainstorm.
Try to have as many ideas as you can.
Speak and record your ideas as you go — avoid writing them down as that, in itself, is a filter that will inhibit creativity.
Don’t do it for too long — use a reasonable time limit.
The key point is that we get the best benefit when we open our mind to free-ranging thought, but we also need to give it some direction. Taking a walk doesn’t mean you will suddenly dream up the greatest gizmo since the iPhone. However, if you have a problem to chew on, then a walk or other break away from your desk helps spur new ideas related to that problem.
The surprising habits of original thinkers
I always felt that taking a mental break was productive. There are so many times that I’ve stopped beating my head against a metaphorical brick wall, only to come back with a fresh perspective and a solution.
But I wanted to dig a little bit deeper. Why exactly does it work?
Adam Grant gives us some compelling evidence. According to him, letting our subconscious chew on a problem has all kinds of benefits — a lesson he learned by doing the opposite.
Adam has always been a “pre-crastinator,” meaning, he doesn’t put anything off. As he explains in a pretty insightful talk on the habits of original thinkers, his natural instinct is to attack a problem head on and finish early. He finished his senior thesis four months ahead of time!4
Like Marily, he conducted an experiment. He asked a group of people to come up with some new business ideas. About half of them were told to procrastinate a little bit before they dug in on the problem. And like Marily, he found that the subjects who did procrastinate also had significantly more creative ideas!
His findings led to an interesting discovery: Moderate procrastinators had more ideas than people who didn’t procrastinate.
By letting their subconscious chew on that problem, it fueled their creativity.
He also points out that the more abundant the ideas, the greater the success. The famous composers, inventors, geniuses that we all hear about? They didn’t hold back. They let their creativity flow, and churned out more variety, more ideas. Adam illustrates the point by plotting the number of compositions written, by composer:
All that creativity results in a better chance of stumbling on something truly original and compelling.
Incidentally, Adam also found that chronic procrastinators don’t create more ideas, probably because they don’t engage until the last minute — instead, just cranking out a few rushed ideas. So — don’t overdo it.
Moderate procrastination is a good thing. Taking a walk. An afternoon ride. Letting that problem marinate overnight. Adam says in his talk, “As Erin Sorkin put it, you call it procrastinating, I call it thinking.”
Being quick to start, but slow to finish can be a good thing. It gives us the time we need to be creative.
Good habits, good health
Plus, all of these physical breaks give your mind a mental break and our bodies much needed exercise. Something I learned back in my 20’s, when biking became a daily habit.
As I’ve gotten older, I try to remember those benefits — and take a break. It works, on so many levels.
So, to borrow a phrase from Marily, why not take advantage of the next 20 minutes, put your thoughts on a leash, and go for a walk?
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William Gallagher, Looking back at Steve Jobs’s NeXT, Inc., Sep. 12 2018, Apple Insider.
NeXT Computer, Wikipedia.
Marily Oppezzo, Want to be more creative? Go for a walk, April 2017, TEDxStanford.
Adam Grant, The surprising habits of original thinkers, February 2016, TEDx.