Today’s assignment is about how walking can boost your creativity.
If you've ever been stuck in a creative rut, you know this: Staring at a blank screen will NOT get you out of it.
Friedrich Nietzsche wasn't staring at any computer screens... But even HE knew that inspiration usually strikes as soon as you step away… and start MOVING:
"All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking."
Now, I believe the BEST way to have a great ideas is to have LOTS of ideas... and then sort out the good ones from the bad ones.
So what would you say if you could easily come up with 60% MORE ideas? It’s a no brainer, right?
Well that's exactly what a walk can do for you...
In fact, Stanford researchers Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz found that walking boosts creative thinking in TWO ways.
For one, walking improves "divergent thinking," that is, the ability to come up with as many solutions as possible for a given problem. For example, in one of the experiments, participants had to come up with alternative uses for a regular old tire. Either while sitting down or while walking.
The result? The people who walked, on average, came up with 60 percent more ideas! And here's what's interesting: The effect even lasted for a short while when a person sat back down after a walk.
But walking had another positive effect. Given a prompt phrase, people had to come up with a different phrase that was comparable or similar to the prompt in significant respects.
For example, given the prompt "a robbed safe," you might come up with the phrase "an empty wallet," or "a last minute defeat." So in other words, they had to take the prompt, and connect it with a different, but in some way similar idea.
Once again, the walkers were more creative: 100 percent of those who walked outside were able to generate at least one high-quality, novel analogy compared to only 50 percent of those seated inside.
So as you can see, walking can help you 1. "think outside the box" AND 2. "connect the dots." Pretty amazing, right? Well, today’s assignment will help you crank up your “idea machine.” So let’s jump in!
Start with...
Try to do this assignment before you start anything else. It will take about 1 hour to walk and complete the rest of the steps. So get up 1 hour early!
In Step 5 you will write down 10 ideas. Don’t worry - you don’t have to think of alternate uses for a tire, like in the study…
...BUT the test in the study does hint at a major takeaway on how we think about our limitations:
Too often we look at our limitations as reasons for why we CAN’T do something. “I don’t have the money for it” , “I don’t have enough time”, “I don’t have the right tools”, and so on.
But the truth is that limitations are INSPIRING. Here’s why...
It is MUCH harder to come up with ideas, when there are NO limitations at all. Austin Kleon, author of “Steal Like an Artist” says it best:
“There’s nothing more paralyzing than having limitless possibilities.”
So… To get the most out of the creative boost from your walk this morning, I want you to limit yourself to a specific topic first. You don’t even have to come up with a topic yourself. Just choose one from the list:
Got your topic? Great, let’s move on to...
Now that you have a topic… Go on a 45 minute walk!
Take a notebook to write down your ideas as they come up. Don’t think too hard. And don’t worry about whether your ideas are good or bad. Just collect them. You can always edit later.
Then...
As we learned from the Stanford study, the creative boost lasts even AFTER you walk. So, when you get back from your walk, take another 15 minutes.
Write down 10 more ideas. And don't turn on your computer yet. Because as comedian John Cleese put it:
“We don’t know where we get our ideas from. What we do know is we do not get them from our laptops.”
And then leave a comment! How does it feel to start your day off with a walk?
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