The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything

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The 3 B’s of creating space

Does creating space just mean taking a break? Doing nothing?

No, it’s much more important than that.

The space itself has productive purpose.

Chris Ulrich is the head of a growing tech company. Digital apps, digital currency, digital development—his entire life is digital. But he says his best ideas come from the notepad he leaves beside his bed. A former retail CEO told me his biggest business problems were always solved by a long jog in the woods. Imagine! Not the office, boardroom, or conferences. Just running in the woods. And Teddy Kravitz, who runs one of North America’s largest talent agencies, says he can’t explain it, but whenever he’s on his three-hour Sunday-morning bike ride he always gets a brilliant idea how he can do something differently. He says he’s rigged up his cell phone on his arm to leave voicemails to himself while riding.

Creativity researchers sometimes refer to places ideas suddenly pop into our heads as the three B’s:

“When we take time off from working on a problem, we change what we’re doing and our context, and that activates different areas of our brain,” says Keith Sawyer, author of Explaining Creativity. “If the answer wasn’t in the part of the brain we were using, it might be in another. If we’re lucky, in the next context we may hear or see something that relates—distantly—to the problem we had temporarily put aside.”

Where did Newton discover gravity? Sitting under an apple tree.

Where did Niels Bohr discover the structure of the atom? In a lab with gigantic microscopes? In a classroom with walls of equations on blackboards? During a meeting with the world’s greatest minds? No, he was led by strange images in his dreams.

Where did Archimedes discover that the volume of irregular objects could be measured by water displacement? This was two thousand years ago in Ancient Greece, mind you. Surely he must have met with kings, studied ideas from Plato, or debated scientific insights in lengthy letters with contemporaries? No, he was stepping into a bath and noticed the water spill over the tub. When he made the connection he shouted, “Eureka!” which is Ancient Greek for “I have found it!”