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

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This is how NASA, Alfred Hitchcock, and Nicole Katsuras use this secret

Why does creating space work?

Stop thinking to do. Stop doing to think. Stop both and your brain gets really excited.

Trouble struck NASA in 1993 when their revolutionary Hubble Space Telescope broke down. There it was, spinning around Earth, way up in the sky, with a busted ninety-six-inch mirror—unable to do the thing it was blasted up there to do, which was take pictures of the universe to figure out how big and old our starry home is. Pretty important job.

NASA was reeling from the Challenger disaster of 1986 and completely losing a Mars Observer the year before. Whoops! Those only cost 813 million dollars. Now their telescope was flying around broken. They were a laughingstock. They were stressed. “We all feel extra pressure,” Joseph Rothenberg, NASA’s associate director of flight projects, said at the time. What if funding was cut? Programs chopped? So they did what many organizations do when they’re scared and in trouble: Double down. Bet it all. Go for broke.

NASA opened the purse strings and spent a year training their most experienced astronauts with two hundred custom-made tools to go up and actually try to fix the distorted mirror inside the Hubble Space Telescope while it flew around outer space. They had to save their reputation.

But there was just one problem.

As the months went on, as scientists burned cash, nobody could figure out how they were actually going to attach this new mirror inside the telescope.

Where did the solution eventually come from?

Creating space.

One day NASA engineer Jim Crocker was taking a shower in a hotel in Germany and he noticed the European-style showerhead mounted on adjustable rods with folding arms. A brain wave occurred, and Jim pictured using the same rods to mount the new mirrors inside the Hubble.

Flash-forward and this moment of clarity was the secret to fixing the telescope and allowing it to function to this day. Jim wasn’t working late on Friday. He wasn’t in the lab all weekend. He was in the shower on vacation, allowing his brain the space to relax. When it wasn’t told what to do, it did its own thing. Today the Hubble routinely pulls back colorful, mind-bending images that expand imaginations around the world. All from a German shower.

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Alfred Hitchcock is called the Master of Suspense and directed more than fifty films over six decades, including Psycho and The Birds. How did he create space while working on a tough screenplay?

One of his cowriters says: “When we came up against a block and our discussions became very heated and intense, he would stop suddenly and tell a story that had nothing to do with the work at hand. At first I was almost outraged and then I discovered that he did this intentionally. He mistrusted working under pressure, and he would say, ‘We’re pressing, we’re pressing, we’re working too hard. Relax, it will come.’ And of course it finally always did.”

Creating space in our minds allows thoughts to swish and swirl around without us stirring them with a wooden spoon. They are free. They fly in different directions. And we often like the taste of what comes back.

Creating space even works in less obvious ways. Take abstract painter Nicole Katsuras, whose work is exhibited in London, Seoul, and Paris. Stephen Ranger, a contemporary art specialist at Waddington’s, describes her work as “quasi-abstractions that transcend the inherent limits of pictures, sharing a vision that is uniquely hers.”

What does Nicole Katsuras say about creating space?

“I find my most creative period in the studio is when I reach a space that I call the void. That’s when time slows down and speeds up all at once. My unconscious and conscious are calm and I am no longer aware. When I reach the void, I am totally consumed with pushing paint on canvas. A sort of meditative state. Around me is just white noise—a humming of nothing—devoid of thought, sound, and everything physical, other than my paint and canvas. In the void I never remember how much time has passed or what I was doing before or during. It is my most productive creative time. It is where some of my best work happens.”

What about the actual white space she has in her paintings?

“I try to re-create these moments—little plateaus, breaks, and resting spots amongst the abstract imagery for the viewer’s eyes to rest from the organized chaos of thick, colorful, sculptural gobs of paint. I think that moments of stillness are important to appreciate both the big and small things that are all around us.”

So how do you create space?

How do you free your mind like Newton, Bohr, or Archimedes? How do you open your brain to receive insights worthy of NASA, Hitchcock, or Katsuras? How do you clear your thoughts so you have space to come up with innovative ideas that challenge your business? Is it as simple as jogging on Sunday mornings?

No. It’s not. You might not have time for that jog. You could be weighed down mentally while racing down the street. You may have too much going on. Big meetings, busy days.

You know the Space Scribble. You know you need to get there. But rather than just saying “Go on vacation more, dummy!” I want to share three specific and tangible ways you can create space.

I want to introduce the 3 Removals. Think of them as caped crusaders in menacing black masks holding big, sharp scythes. Ready to hack parts of your life away so you’re free to do other things. Space comes from hacking. Space in dense jungles comes from hacking at vines. Space in calendars comes from hacking at meetings. Space in your life comes from hacking at choice, time, and access.