Take a walk to Creativity
Don’t you feel good when academic research validates something you’ve always known to be true because your gut told you so?
It happened to me again when a couple of years ago researchers out of Stanford determined what a highly effective boost it is to your creative capacity and to your entrepreneurial mindset to simply take a walk.
I’ve walked in the woods with my dogs almost every day and the more actively engaged in a creative challenge I happen to be the more likely I am hiking for a couple of miles, on a path to get started, off the path when that feels right, wondering while wandering and then sitting under a tree to write down what I have been thinking, hiking back, and writing it up on my laptop.
Inevitably I find new questions to ask, new perspectiveS to apply or offer, new language to inform: it’s likely the refreshing walk could be subsequently charged to a client for the value it delivers. My gut told me it was the long walk and it was an alert mind’s subconscious reading of the complex natural systems around me.
The research says I was right and I was wrong.
In 2014 Oppezzo and Schwartz found that a person walking indoors or outdoors would deliver twice the number of creative solutions for a challenge than someone sitting would, and that a treadmill in a gym was as effective as a walk in the park. And since creativity is a numbers game–the more ideas you have, the more likely you discover a good one–this has significance to your creatively entrepreneurial life.
The duration of the walk ranged between 5 and 16 minutes, depending on the nature of the creative task they were performing.
One way I apply this: I try to get to my meeting location in time to walk the ten minutes leading up to the meeting, re-considering the content of the meeting and sharpening my preparation for the best generative engagement. Some folks I know have invited walking meetings into their companies’ culture.
It’s another one of those simple creative hacks I promise to deliver; I call myself a creative populist because this stuff is both available to all and foundationally useful to each one of us.