Use This Practice to Have More Bursts of Creative Insight
Joshua Waitzkin, author of the beautiful book The Art of Learning, is a man with a singular list of accomplishments.
Waitzkin started playing chess at six years old almost by accident, and was immediately recognized as a prodigy. At seven he was the top ranked player at his age in the country. He went on to win numerous championships, and became a celebrity after becoming the subject of the feature film, Searching for Bobby Fischer.
In a rare twist, Waitzkin then trained professionally in martial arts in his twenties, becoming the world champion in Tai Chi push hands—a rare accomplishment for an American. He followed this by becoming a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and opening a gym in New York City with the great Marcelo Garcia.
Waitzkin has said that his success in each of these disciplines came in part from his ability to be relentlessly proactive rather than reactive, moment by moment, day by day. He set up his life to foster creative insights. To keep his hand on the valve of creative flow and seemingly turn it on at will, on schedule.
Most people, in contrast, go through their days and lives being reactive.
“A simple case in point,” Waitzkin said on a podcast back in 2014, “is email checking [or, if you prefer, social media checking]. Most people, when they finish a break, even top guys in industries…they wake up first thing in the morning, what do most people do? They check their email. When they come back from a workout, what do they do? They check their email. When the they come back from lunch, what do they do? They check their email. What you see is that whenever they're coming back from something after a break, they're soaking in inputs and so they live this reactive lifestyle. Their creative process is dominated by external noise, as opposed to internal music.”
Waitzkin has worked with other top performers to build systems that foster creativity. “And a lot of what I work on with guys is creating rhythms in their life that really are based on feeding the unconscious mind, which is the wellspring of creativity… and then tapping it.”
Here’s a simple practice from Waitzkin that you can follow to have more bursts of insight on your most important creative projects.
Just before finishing work at the end of the day, focus on an area of complexity where you need a creative insight. Crystallize the question in your mind. Write it down.
Once you have defined your Most Important Question, release it. Really let go of it and take a break. Have dinner with friends. Spend time with family. Go see a movie.
Then, first thing next morning, set that same question in front of you and journal about it. Apply your conscious mind to tapping into the connections that your unconscious mind has been creating overnight.
This practice is not fancy. It’s not a sexy app, a colorful platform, or an AI service. It’s also not magic. It takes practice. Yet by training in this way, you can eventually have major creative insights not just once a month or once a year, but once a day or more.
Are you willing to try it? Apply this practice to your own work this week. Every day, before finishing work, crystallize your Most Important Question, release it, and journal on it the next morning.
Give it a week and see how this simple act of being proactive can channel your proactive focus and summon your creative energies. Then give it two weeks, a month, and the rest of the year.
Note: The quotes above are from a podcast interview Waitzkin did on the Tim Ferriss Show. Waitzkin was Ferriss’s second-ever guest, Episode 2. I recommend listening to the whole episode, and the other conversations between Ferriss and Waitzkin. The Art of Learning is one of my all-time favorite books, and I recommend reading it in print as well as listening to the audiobook, which is read by the author.