What happens in the other two boxes?
Think means you’re thinking. Pretty simple. You’re reflecting, spacing yourself from doing anything, but still engaging your mind. Journaling. Writing a book. Talking about an issue at work with a friend, partner, or therapist. All great things to do. All physically relaxing, which allows you to completely indulge and engage in your thoughts.
Do means you’re doing. No thinking! Just doing. Hiking a mountain. Working out intensely. Physically engaged. All your blood pounds to your muscles and lets your mind slip away and relax.
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The Space Scribble says every single moment you’re in one of four boxes.
And every single moment you need to know which one you’re in and which you’re going to next.
Happy people alternate between boxes. They flip-flop. They swirl. They jump. They know where they are and they know how to create space.
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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!”
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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.”