The best way to find the brilliant solution we seek for our winning business idea is sometimes not to seek it. Instead, we consciously and deliberately empty ourselves of all distractions to make room for the kind of new inspiration that makes our stomachs flutter with excitement.
Why first thing in the morning? In a half-awake state, your brain is not as good at filtering out distractions and focusing on a particular task. It’s also a lot less efficient at remembering connections between ideas or concepts. These are both good things when it comes to creative work, since this kind of work requires us to make new connections, to be open to new ideas, and to think in new ways. So, a tired, fuzzy brain is of much more use to us when working on creative projects like finding solutions to a winning idea.
In 2012, a Scientific American article described how distractions can actually be a good thing for creative thinking: Insight problems involve thinking outside the box. This is where susceptibility to “distraction” can be of benefit. At off-peak times, we are less focused, and we may consider a broader range of information. This wider scope gives us access to more alternatives and diverse interpretations, thus fostering innovation and insight. It is also noteworthy that when, for whatever reason, I skip my early-morning meditation session, sometime later that day Lyn will invariably say, “You didn’t take quiet time today, did you?” When I don’t, she says my self-confidence vibe is “off.”
Connect to Nature: Expanding the Mind
As I read the biographies of successful businesspeople and entrepreneurs, another character trait that jumped out at me was their affiliation with nature. All of them turned to nature in times of stress or when big decisions needed to be made. Today, what I’ve found is that connecting to nature is a companion activity to meditation: It decreases stress, improves health, and sharpens the mind. To improve intuition and invite inspiration as you develop your winning business idea, take a walk in the woods.
This has been my approach in all of my businesses. I split my day up so that I have dedicated work times and dedicated distraction times. It is always when I close my office door and go for a thirty-minute walk in nature that the great ideas arrive. I notice, however, that if I skip my meditation in the morning, it doesn’t matter how many nature walks I take. No great ideas come to me. The two are definitely bedfellows. Meditate, do some work, go for a walk: I’ve found this to be a pretty powerful prescription.
Henry Ford was passionate about walking in the country and reconnecting to nature. He encouraged workers to exercise in their off-hours and believed that, next to work, a person’s duty was to think. Ford retreated to an old farmhouse near the family dairy in Dearborn. He sat on the ground when it was dry and in an old rocking chair when it was wet and simply let thoughts come to him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was another who attributed his success, and his sense of tranquility, to being at one with nature. He spent as much time walking in a forest as working in an office because that is where he found his inspiration. Emerson described being in nature as “a high discourse; the voice of the speaker seems to breathe as much from the landscape as from his own breast; it is Nature communing with the seer.”
To channel his restlessness, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s mother paid him to clear and plant an eight-acre field. In that solitude, he came up with the ideas that made him a billionaire. I read that it worked for them, so I tried it and discovered that it worked for me. Kick it around. What do you have to lose? To enhance the benefits of taking quiet time, plug into nature and access its expanded reservoir of knowledge, just as a single computer plugs into the World Wide Web.
Here is my four-point nature prescription:
1.Reconnect with nature daily. No excuses. I consider this a necessity, as vital as eating, drinking, and working.
2.Keep reconnecting simple: Observe a flower and silently compliment it on its beauty, say hello to a bird, relocate an insect outdoors and wish it a safe journey, admire the landscape, stand barefoot on grass and experience the sheer joy of its coolness. You don’t have to climb Mount Everest and sit on a pointy rock in a vow of silence. Nature is connectivity; being in it, you become part of its matrix. It will teach you. Just relax and listen.
3.Observe mostly in silence without doing anything else. If you take a stroll with someone and chat the whole time, you will miss the point and the benefit. I have lost count of the number of times I have seen dolphins or whales while the people around me miss them because they are gossiping, complaining, or exercising so intensely they aren’t observing. Leave the phone behind; don’t let calls or texts interrupt.
4.If you live in a concrete jungle, you may have to work harder to find nature, but she is all around: in the clouds, in window boxes, in grassy sidewalks. There is no difference or separation between a patch of grass in a disused parking lot and a giant oak in a wood. As Henry Miller said, “Even a blade of grass when given proper attention becomes an infinitely magnificent world in itself.” All life is a doorway to reconnect with the force of nature. Go outside and observe, admire, respect. Simple.
Winning Ideas Create a Sense of Awe
A winning idea, when it comes, is not like a typical, everyday “good idea.” Trust me, when you have a winning idea, you will know because you won’t be able to stop smiling or pacing the kitchen floor. Meditation and connecting with nature are powerful ways to deepen intuition and expand connectivity into a universe of solutions. The flashes of insight we receive as a result are more like complete blueprints than “wouldn’t it be cool” flights of fancy. They have us smacking our foreheads wondering why we never thought of them before, since they now seem so clear, so obvious, so perfect. Truly inspired, winning ideas induce a sense of wonder and awe.
That said, insights can take their own sweet time, and they usually arrive when we least expect them. Before I started my first company, I knew what made me mad. I knew what I wanted to fix. But I didn’t know how. Every day for several weeks I meditated and connected with nature. Lots of ideas sparked in my mind, and I was careful to jot every one of them down. However, none of them were quite right. Then one day I took quiet time just before checking out of a hotel room.
An hour later, I was walking through a busy airport terminal when the solution to the problem came to me in a flash. It was not a vague idea or a notion. It wasn’t a sketch. It was a detailed architectural blueprint, as if a diagram had unrolled on the floor in front of me. All at once, I saw the whole business model that could work to get those patients their medicine and make a profitable business. I actually stopped walking and let out a laugh that had other travelers thinking I had flipped out.
For my second company, the idea came to me while I was driving shortly after taking quiet time. I had to pull over and start writing feverishly on sticky notes. When I had it all written down, I continued driving to my appointment, but I could not get the idea to go away. So I canceled the appointment, turned the car around, drove home, and immediately set about turning the idea into a real company.
This is why you should never be more than an arm’s length away from pen and paper.
How can you distinguish a garden-variety good idea from a genuine “winning idea”? What do awe and wonder feel like? In a way, it’s like love. You know it when you feel it, and if you’re unsure, you probably aren’t feeling it. But I like how Emmy-nominated TV personality, filmmaker, and futurist Jason Silva puts it:
It is an experience of such perceptual vastness you literally have to reconfigure your mental models of the world in order to assimilate it. One of the ways we elicit wonder is by scrambling the self so that the world can seep through. In doing so we feel such a blast of energy and expectation that we literally want to rocket to the moon. We feel stupefied amazement every time we think of our dream. It is rapture. It is magic. Only in these moments do we experience the power of a lightning strike in our minds and nerves. It is rhapsodic. It is what I saw in my wife’s eyes every time we talked about it. She glowed. She floated. It was as if every time we talked about it, I had just placed a tiny puppy in her arms. That is awe.