(audience applause)
- Thank you all so much.
I'm happy to be here.
Have you ever had a really great idea in the shower?
Have you ever wondered why you have really great ideas
in the shower?
It's kind of annoying, isn't it?
Why not have this great idea in your office
or at least somewhere that's kind of dry,
somewhere where you're not trying to open your phone
with your wet fingers, swiping over and over again,
trying to get it to turn on so you can take a note.
What is going on with this?
It turns out the shower sets just the right conditions
to activate the part of your brain
that creates breakthroughs.
It's a part that we don't give center stage to
nearly enough.
This is the part of your brain
responsible for creativity.
And 99% of people around the world
have never heard of it.
So what is this part of your brain?
What is this part that gives us our human genius,
our inventiveness, our innovation?
It enabled Einstein
to discover his special theory of relativity
and it enabled Keith Richards
to write the hit song Satisfaction.
We tend to think of breakthrough moments
as being accidental, lucky moments.
They're anything but.
And thanks to recent neuroscience discoveries,
we can not only explain breakthroughs,
we can help you set the conditions to induce them.
So do you want to know what this part of your brain is?
- [Audience] Yes.
- You want to know how to gain access to it?
- [Male] Yes please.
- We thought you might.
So without further ado,
it's really the story of two systems.
And some of you right now might be thinking to yourselves,
oh, this is gonna be a left brain, right brain thing.
No.
Take that concept and try and remove it.
It's very outdated.
Your brain is a series of overlapping networks.
And we're gonna talk about two of them.
The first one is the executive network.
Now this one,
for those of you who are overachievers,
you're probably very familiar with it.
It's very fastidious.
It's very punctual.
It's always got a goal,
it's oriented towards that goal,
it's task focused.
Its making a list, it's checking it twice,
it's picking people up at the airport.
This is the part of you that you put on a resume.
The second network is called the default network
and it's called that because when you're not on task,
you default to it.
It's made up of about 10 brain regions.
Everything from sensory information to metacognition,
future prediction to memory,
error prediction to empathy.
We like to call it the genius lounge.
It's non linear and it's the seat of all your genius ideas.
This you do not put on your resume.
Well, I'm gonna give you an example.
Imagine this resume,
2014 to 2016,
senior director of staring off into space randomly
every 20 minutes or so
and lead of random and meandering walking
in the middle of the day.
2017 to present, got promoted,
SVP of imagining the world without trees.
It's kind of a ridiculous thing to put on your resume.
The thing of it is
is it shows our biases,
it shows the level of our biases
that we would never put anything like that on a resume
because the science tells us
that it is exactly these sorts of behaviors we need
in order to have breakthroughs.
Whether it's Dmitri Mendeleev waking up from a nap
and having the periodic table in his head
or Werner Heisenberg walking home from dinner
with Niels Bohr across a park
and suddenly discovering the uncertainty principle.
The stories about this process
are seemingly endless.
Now, at this point,
some of you might be saying to yourselves,
well, I'm just not a creative type.
I want to promise all of you
that everyone in this room
has this system that we're talking about.
You have the same exact system in your brain as Einstein.
To say I'm not a creative person
is equivalent to sitting on a couch for two straight years
basically not moving
and your friend comes over
and bets you you can't do five push ups.
And when you can't do even one,
you roll on your back,
you give a big sigh and you go,
well, I guess I'm just a couch potato.
I think I'm gonna double down on this couch sitting thing.
You know that's not true.
You know you have muscles.
They've just atrophied.
When you say I'm not a creative person,
it's the same thing.
Your brain has the muscles,
you're just accepting the fact
that you're a neural couch potato.
What you need to do is practice.
Breakthrough thinking is not a theory,
it's something that you do.
And so you have to get your brain in shape for it.
And that means practicing.
So what is it that you have to practice?
There's three main things.
These are the three keys to breakthrough thinking,
neuroplasticity, associative thinking and mode switching.
We use these with individuals, we use them with teams,
we use them with entire organizations.
So let's start with neuroplasticity.
Erik Weihenmayer has climbed the seven tallest mountains
on all seven continents.
Now this means he has climbed the 16,000 foot Mt. Vinson
in Antarctica.
Personally, I don't know why
you would do all seven mountains on seven continents
but he did,
it's impressive, nonetheless.
What's even more impressive is that he is blind.
And so you might ask yourself,
how did he manage to do this?
And the answer is he used a mechanism called a brain port.
The brain port is a camera
with a little relay that sits on the tongue.
The camera converts visual data
into electrical impulses,
just like your eye does.
But instead of sending it up the optic nerve into the brain
it sends it through the tongue into the brain.
Now Weihenmayer's brain was not built
to interpret visual data through his tongue
but his brain rewired itself to be able to do that.
The most important thing you have to understand
about neuroplasticity
is that your brain is a physical structure.
Your brain is rewiring itself every second of every day.
For you to have a new idea,
you have to literally build new neural connections
between your neurons,
physical structures.
When you have a breakthrough idea,
there is a physical corollary in your brain.
You can literally look and see the new neural loop
that has been created to create this breakthrough.
Now the exercises I'm gonna share with you right now
are not necessarily going to create breakthroughs for you.
But what they are going to do
is build up your muscle.
It's kind of like doing cardio and strength training
if you're an athlete.
So here's the first one
and this one, we tend to do with teams a lot
before getting to a larger question with them,
it sort of pops their brains open.
So I want you all to close your eyes.
And if you're listening to this on a podcast
and driving right now,
please don't close your eyes
and don't look at your phone.
But for the rest of you,
please close your eyes.
And I want you to imagine this thought experiment.
What would our world look like
if gravity stopped working at 10 p.m.
and then started working again at seven a.m.?
How has our culture evolved if that is the situation?
Are there nets over everyone's homes?
Are the people who own the nets,
the richest people on the planet?
Do people put their beds on the ceilings
and then put mats on the floor
in case they fall and oversleep?
How do teenagers decide to rebel and get in trouble?
Do they grab a bottle of alcohol,
and cut a whole in the net and just float off somewhere?
Depending on who you ask,
you get different answers,
designers start designing whole houses
to be careful for this,
artists start depicting all the beautiful art
that could be created in zero g.
Okay, you can open your eyes.
One of the things to look for
is how was that experience for you?
Was it exhilarating?
Was it exhausting?
Was it frightening?
Was it a lot of fun?
How comfortable are you
in engaging in these wide open things?
And when you came upon an idea you'd never come upon before,
and you had to build the structure in your brain
to actually visualize it,
that's plasticity.
Here's another one you can play with at home.
Turn on a foreign movie with no subtitles for 20 minutes
and try and figure out what's going on.
Notice what you pay attention to.
You might start paying attention to the tone of voice
or the way the camera is angled
or what people are doing with their faces or their bodies.
You start taking in completely different information
which is forcing you
to build completely different connections.
Again, it might seem like very far field
from having a breakthrough
but it's the building the muscle
towards those breakthroughs.
That's the important part.
When it comes to plasticity,
it works both ways as well.
It's not just about building new connections.
We also have to prune away old useless connections
in order to make space.
So your brain has a delete button.
We have an article about this on our website.
You can literally set your brain to forget things
so that you create more space
so that you can have more and new ideas.
It's working on both sides.
That's just a very quick run
through how neuroplasticity plays into this.
The next tool is associative thinking.
Now associative thinking
is kind of the magic of the brain
because it's taking different ideas
that you may not think are connected
and bringing them together
and finding the pattern,
finding the similarities between them
that can allow you to have a breakthrough.
Steve Jobs once said,
"Creativity is just putting things together."
And in many ways, your default network
is just putting things together.
So Samuel O'Reilly was walking down the street in New York
in the early 1900s
and looked in the window and saw one of Thomas Edison's
least successful inventions,
the electric pen.
I'm guessing most of you had no idea
that Thomas Edison created an electric pen.
That's how successful it was.
But O'Reilly saw something in it
and he took it home and he started playing with it
and he created the world's first modern tattooing machine.
He was a tattoo artist.
He saw something in it,
it didn't have to be made out of the blue,
he could associate to something brand new
and shift the way he responded to it,
shift the way he reacted to it.
I want to show you this.
So this is a write up
of the opening of the plot of Disney's Pocahontas.
And this is from a guy Matt Bateman online.
And what's interesting is if you take the date
and you take the names and the place
and you change them with all of those things
from the movie Avatar,
you basically find out it's the same exact movie.
They're literally telling the same exact story.
And you can find this a lot
all throughout literature.
All the games you can play
as people layer things on top of each other.
So here's a fun one for you to do at home.
When you have time,
watch the Matrix trilogy.
After you watch that trilogy,
watch the Lego Movie
and tell me what you find.
And you can play this game
with all kinds of movies.
You can play this game with all kinds of books.
The patterns that start playing over and over again.
It's kind of fascinating and fun.
So the question becomes
where's the rubber meet the road on this stuff?
Why are we even bothering with it?
So Bill O'Connor from Autodesk
is the head of the Human Genome Project
and they've come up
with seven essential innovation questions
which at first you're like,
are you kidding me?
But you actually go through it
and you find out that it's actually a very effective guide
to lead you through any kind of solution you're looking for
and looking at it from multiple angles,
multiple directions,
helping you associate it in different ways.
So the seven questions are,
look,
use,
move,
interconnect,
alter,
make,
and imagine.
Now those seven,
each of them breaks down into six sub questions.
So it becomes a very long list
that you can popcorn through.
And Bill does some amazing consulting work using this.
But what it does is it creates a concrete frame
around which to engage in a very ethereal process
which is the breakthrough.
When I worked with special forces,
we'd do it in a slightly different way
and we'd look at historical situations
and ask ourselves,
can we learn anything from what happened in the past
to gauge what's gonna happen right now?
We took a look at the Arab Spring
and we compared it to the revolutions of 1848
and discovered amazing similarities
that actually predicted
how the Arab Spring was gonna play out.
And another time, we took a look
at how Germany almost won World War One
because of decentralized communication
and how there were lessons to be learned
about fighting Al Qaeda at the time.
So looking into the past
to gain a sense of what's going on right now
can have a huge effect on what you see as possible,
what you see as a breakthrough.
One last story I'll tell you about this,
Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital
needed a new CEO so they hired Gerard Van Grinsven.
He had never worked in a hospital in his life.
However, he had a lot of experience
creating a very attentive, supportive staff.
He had a lot of experience being on call
at any hour of the night.
He had a lot of experience
of getting people into their rooms quickly
and he had a lot of experience
of putting the guest first.
He'd been an executive with the Ritz Carlton Hotels
for 25 years.
West Bloomfield has become one of the best hospitals
in the world,
famous for its breakthroughs and its innovations
all because somebody was able to see the connection
between running a hotel and running a hospital
and how moving from one to her other
could have a position effect on the hospital.
It's being open to these possibilities
that is one of the key elements to doing this work.
And that's why I'm encouraging you to play,
have fun with these things,
find the patterns where you can,
go far out of field.
Carl Jung's entire opus
that he's passed on to future generations
started when he decided to go into his backyard
and start playing like he did as a child.
So the next time you're hanging out with a little kid,
play with them.
Don't watch them play.
Actually get down at their level,
see what they're doing,
engage with them.
It will bring in information you are not expecting
and shift things completely for you.
It's an incredibly powerful experience.
So the last skill I want to talk about is mode switching.
This is switching between your executive network
and your default network
and I want to show you an animated video
about how Keith Richards used mode switching
to come up with a hit song.
(groovy music)
Florida, 1965,
The Rolling Stones are on their first U.S. tour
but they're not The Rolling Stones yet.
They're about as popular as Hermin's Hermits.
What they're in need of is a breakthrough hit,
a number one song.
And no one knows it more than Keith Richards.
One night in his motel room,
Richards was trying to write that song.
So what's going on inside his brain
when he's attempting to have this breakthrough?
This is the executive of Keith Richard's brain.
It's focused, on task and has a goal,
write a hit song.
There's just one problem,
it's not very good at breakthroughs by itself.
See the executive network is great
when you need to make a list or complete a project
but when it comes to having a breakthrough,
it needs some help.
That night, Richards fell asleep
and no longer on task,
his executive went to talk to another network
that lies deeper in the brain.
Now what we're about to show you
is not unique to Keith Richards.
You have the same exact room in your brain.
We all do,
we just don't access it enough.
This is your Genius Lounge.
About 10 different brain regions in here
all hanging out talking.
There's Mozart, Leonardo Da Vinci, Marie Curie, Einstein.
Welcome to the part of your brain
that's working on stuff
when you don't think you're working on stuff.
That night, Richard's executive walked in and said, "Quiet.
"Alright, everyone, we need a breakthrough hit.
"Now go."
The executive went and busied itself
with something mindless,
in this case sleep.
But it can be doing the dishes or the laundry
or taking a shower.
Meanwhile, the geniuses started sharing
all kinds of information
from art to music to childhood memories,
this was the sum total
of Keith Richard's experience and knowledge
and the combining created his intuition,
it created a breakthrough.
Richards woke up in the middle of the night
and began to play.
("Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones)
That was how The Rolling Stones
got their breakthrough hit Satisfaction.
But it is not just Keith Richards.
We all have an executive and a Genius Lounge in our brains.
The key to having more breakthroughs
is learning how to switch between the two modes.
It's an absolutely true story
and Richards actually talks about
how the next morning he woke up
having no memory of what he had done
and he saw the tape recorder had run all the way out.
And so he rewound it and it was 59 minutes of him snoring
and then 30 seconds of the opening bars of Satisfaction.
And he said he fell right back asleep
and you could hear the guitar pick fall out of his hand
and hit the floor.
These stories, as I said, they're kind of legendary,
they're happening all the time.
And it's about this ability
to kind of step into this open space
where we allow different random ideas
to connect with one another
and then to step back out,
to switch out of that mode
back to the executive.
Because we're gonna have a bias one way or the other.
Some people are gonna have a bias for the executive,
and they're gonna say the executive network
is what gets everything done.
It's all about hard work,
it's about perspiration,
it's about discipline.
Anybody can have a good idea.
It's all about the implementation.
I'm sure you've heard all of these things
at different times in your life.
Other people are gonna have a bias
towards the default network.
It's all about staying loose,
giving yourself time,
being open minded,
just letting things emerge.
Both are completely true.
What we need is we need the openness
to allow them both to happen,
to switch back and forth.
Now when we work with individuals,
one of the things that we do
is work with them to create these spaces.
These are the sort of spaces
that happen when you're falling asleep,
when you get into the shower.
We have a bias against them,
we feel like if we're not using our executive network,
we're not really working
and we feel like if we're using our default network
somehow we're slacking off,
somehow this isn't what we're supposed to be doing.
But to actually create time,
to actually use our executive network
to create a focus,
to say this is a goal I want,
to fill our brains with a certain amount of information,
and then to be able to switch modes,
to be able to let go
and just let your brain wander about,
this is the key
'cause then when you actually have an idea,
it will come back into your consciousness
and now you need the discipline again,
now you need to work on it.
When it came out of his head
and he had those opening eight bars from Keith Richards,
it wasn't done.
The Rolling Stones recorded it the next day in Chicago
and they recorded it as kind of a slow bluesy thing
and nobody liked it, it didn't work.
Two days later, they were in L.A.,
they had a different producer in a different studio
and the rest of the band started weighing in
on what it should be
and from all of that back and forth,
that's when you ended up with the Satisfaction
that we all know.
So the switching between,
the giving yourself the focus
but then giving yourself the leeway to have the idea
and then working hard on the idea.
This is what makes it all possible.
Now, we've adapted what we've learned from the brain
for people to use with their teams,
for people to use with their organizations.
One of the things that we talk about
and we have an article about this,
is what we call quiet and loud brainstorming.
This is a way of bringing mode switching
into a room full of people
where you simply give everyone a topic
and then it's quiet for the first five minutes or 10 minutes
and everybody writes down their thoughts,
then you open it up and it gets loud for however long,
a little bit shorter, five minutes let's say,
everybody shares their information
and then everybody goes quiet again
and writes what they think.
You keep bouncing in and out like this
through this brainstorm
and it gives everybody a chance
to bring their ideas to the table.
It kind of opens it up in a different way.
Another one that we like to use
is bio mimicking the brain.
So you've got this structure,
you've got all these different pieces
that your brain is using to create a breakthrough,
to connect different ideas.
And so what we did is we figured out
that if you fill the space with people who are mavens,
they're really on top of what's going on in the world,
people who are makers, they love building things,
people who are deep theorists,
they're just caught in their heads
and they know all of the theories,
then people who are wide generalists,
they know a lot about a lot of things,
then you get people in there who have a lot of empathy,
you get people in there
who have a tremendous amount of experience
all over the place
and then you have people who are kind of like,
they're deep in this in terms of their memory.
They've been around the block before
with whatever it is you're working on,
they know the history.
This is a way to actually mimic
what your brain is doing when you have a breakthrough
but to mimic it outside,
to bring all of these disparate pieces together
and then engage them in mode switching
which can create more of these breakthroughs.
The reason we ended up looking
at how to take what the brain is doing and apply it
to people in organizations
was because we kept running into
these issues our clients had.
They kept getting told you need to be more collaborative,
you need to diversify,
you need to decentralize,
you need to be flatter.
But nobody had any idea how to do these things.
And so people did things like have open offices.
They decided to have slack channels.
How's that working out for everybody?
Everybody's wearing headphones,
they're reserving conferences spaces so they can sit alone
and they're lobbing bombs on open slack channels
and just creating all kinds of mayhem
'cause nobody knows how to do this.
But our brain has actually mastered
how to handle complexity,
how to move through complexity
and find the signal through the noise.
And so by using the brain's systems and processes
as a guide
and mimicking it to build tools,
we have enabled people
to start engaging with the complexity of the world
while at the same time,
being effective at being collaborative,
allowing diverse voices into the room,
being more transparent, being more respectful.
This is where the study of the brain is paying off
in huge dividends
because it is so well evolved for the world that we live in.
These are the three main tools,
neuroplasticity, associative thinking, mode switching.
But the question's still there,
what is it to have a breakthrough?
What's it like to have a breakthrough?
Well, it kinda depends
on your own personal breakthrough style.
We've identified four.
Now that doesn't mean these are the only four
but when we looked around,
it kind of broke down into one of these four styles.
The first one's Eureka breakthrough
which you all kind of know about.
This is when you suddenly, you know it, it's concrete,
it's certain
and there's a great story about the Black Hawk helicopters
during the Iraq War
had lexan windshields
which is a hard plastic that scratches very easily.
It's also used on NASCARs.
So these two NASCAR fans who were in the National Reserve
were looking at all these scratched up windshields,
it was costing the army a fortune
and they're like, "Well, why don't we do what NASCAR does?"
They have these mylar tearaways
that they put on top of the windshields,
they take all the scratches,
you pull them off at the end of the race,
windshield's fine.
They did that,
army saved millions upon millions of dollars
and this was just they had a moment,
it just made sense to them, they saw it.
That's Eureka.
Then there's metaphorical breakthroughs.
These are less certain.
You kind of get an image in your head,
you get a picture, you get an idea,
you have to interpret it to get the aha moment.
And the most famous one,
I apologize for the mispronunciation Olivia,
is by Auguste Kekule.
He's German, I apologize if I just mangled that,
who was working on the shape of benzene in the mid-1800s.
And he had a dream about a snake eating its own tail
and realized, oh, benzene's shaped as a ring.
It was in the interpretation of the dream
that he was able to have his breakthrough.
So at first, you just get an image and you're like,
okay, great, that was helpful.
You have to work on it,
again, bring the executive network in to work on it
to make sense of it.
The third one is intuitive breakthroughs.
Intuitive breakthroughs are also less certain.
You know a certain direction to go,
you know a path you want to go down
but you're not sure where it's gonna lead.
And a great example of this is Chuck Yeager,
first person to fly faster than the speed of sound.
And before he did it,
every pilot had died.
No one had gotten faster than .85 mach
and the controls would get difficult to use,
the plane would start to wobble
and the engineers were starting to think it was impossible.
And Yeager had a moment.
He was like, I think the plane's gonna get easier to fly
the closer I get to the speed of sound.
Now there was no reason for him to know this.
The PhDs, they didn't think this was true.
But sure enough,
when he went up in the X1,
the closer he got to mach,
the easier the plane got to fly.
How did he know?
He had an intuition.
There was something about his deep mastery of flying
that enabled him to see what was going to be true
and he trusted it.
Now the last one is called paradigm breakthroughs.
We don't spend a lot of time on this one
because it's rare.
This is world changing, relativity style breakthroughs.
They tend to be, to a certain extent,
around the luck of timing.
They tend to be based on a lot of previous breakthroughs.
Einstein was standing on the shoulders
of a host of breakthroughs all throughout the 19th century.
And you can't really set out to do it.
You'll very probably end up down a rabbit hole.
If they happen, they happen and that's wonderful
and we will all be grateful and you will win a Nobel
and forever be ensconced in history
but chasing it is going to be kind of difficult.
Those are the four styles, as I said, that we know of.
So returning to the shower for a moment,
why do we get these good ideas in the shower?
Well, the shower sets the perfect conditions
for mode switching.
You step into the shower
and your executive network has just enough to do
to keep it occupied.
You're gonna clean yourself, that's fine.
It creates a wonderful space for your default network
to start coming on, start working.
And you bring your neuroplasticity in
which gives you the muscle
to start making different associations.
So the shower becomes a perfect place
to bring all of these tools together.
And you may have one of the four styles of breakthroughs
at any point in there.
Last thing,
it's not gonna be easy.
You are gonna face obstacles.
You are gonna face difficulties.
And you're gonna have to push through.
To talk about three of these obstacles,
I would like to introduce my co-author and mother of dragons
Olivia Fox.
(audience applause)
- How many of you have been scared watching a scary movie?
Please raise your hands.
Excellent.
Now, consciously you know that was just a movie, right,
you know that those actors up there
are getting paid bazillions of dollars in exchange
to looking like they're getting their head chopped off, yes?
Subconsciously, however, and in your body,
did you have your pulse racing
and maybe your palms sweating?
Did you feel anything physical
when you were scared watching a scary movie?
Yes.
Why?
With me, please speak up, shout out.
- [Female] The brain doesn't know the difference.
- The brain is not very good at knowing the difference
between imagination and reality.
Let me be a tiny bit more specific
and I'm gonna try to keep on time
so we're gonna skim over a lot of stuff.
A lot of the science,
if you buy our book, we'll be very happy,
our publisher even more so, please do
but a lot of this stuff is available for free on our website
thebutterfly.net, so thebutterfly.net.
So imagination, reality,
affect a lot of the same pathways in the brain
and they have a lot of the same effects in the body.
Now, in normal life,
if you suddenly have an experience of fear,
usually a, it's not really life threatening
and b, it won't necessarily have consequences
on whatever breakthrough you're trying to have.
However, why is fear a problem for breakthroughs,
breakthrough thinking and innovation?
Well, what happens when you're scared?
What does your body do?
- [Male] Limbic system, fight or flight.
- Yes, so tell me about fight or flight,
you're a zebra running away from a lion.
What does your body do?
- [Male] Focus.
- Okay, focus on what?
Let's get specific.
I'm amazed.
I would've expected you guys to know this, seriously.
Come on.
If you're running away from a lion,
you're a zebra,
I know it's a,
you know what, stay human, that's fine,
you're running away from a lion.
What does your body do?
The fight or flight is designed to be an asset.
It's supposed to help you.
What do you think your body does?
- [Male] Adrenaline being produced,
muscles stiff.
- So your muscle reaction time increases.
What else?
- [Female] Adrenaline.
- Adrenaline, what's the adrenaline do?
It's an excellent signal, the adrenaline,
what does it lead to?
- [Female] Raises blood pressure.
- Raises blood pressure.
What else?
- [Female] Opens the veins to let more blood through.
- Yep, so the blood flows better to your muscle,
that's great,
your heart rate increases,
your vision gets more acute.
So all these are critical things to survive.
And what does it shut down?
- [Male] Digestion.
- Digestion.
- [Female] Thinking brain.
- There you go,
so it shuts down everything that's superfluous
to run away from a lion,
digestion, immune system and indeed,
superfluous abilities like cognitive reasoning.
Which means that just when you need it most,
if fear shows up on the way to breakthrough,
it's usually fear of failure and we'll talk about that,
that's when more primal parts of your brain
hijack controls and shut down
the very parts of your brain you need.
One small thing to know about fear and
sorry, I'm running through my brain
to see how much I can cram into six minutes.
You know what, we're gonna move on to failure.
There's a lot more on the website, I promise.
In order to handle fear,
there's quite a few things you can do,
there are some mental tools,
there are some physical tools.
If you've heard of the relaxation response,
it's a very good one to use.
And if you have heard about meditation,
it's an excellent one to use too.
But I think that fear is covered enough elsewhere
that I'd really like to focus on failure actually.
Now I know that especially at Stanford,
you're told often that you should embrace failure
and failure is good
and that's great.
The problem is that they don't tell you how.
And what is it that we,
when we fear failure,
we fear of course the consequences,
but we fear even more
the actual experience of failure itself.
And fear plus failure can manifest in your mind
as a couple of things.
One, the imposter syndrome
which you may have heard of.
The imposter syndrome
is this unfortunate feeling
that so many people have
that you're just waiting,
you don't really know what you're doing
and you're just waiting for the other shoe to drop
for someone to find you out and expose as a fraud.
Have any of you ever felt this ever?
That's pretty confident people, okay.
It turns out that since the imposter syndrome
was first starting to be studied in the '70s,
a vast majority of the population
has felt this way at some point or another
but what's fascinating
is that the higher up the level of education you go,
the worse it gets.
Current theory is that the more you know,
the more you're aware of the sum total of knowledge,
the more you're aware of how small your own knowledge is
in comparison.
But however that may be,
the imposter syndrome is caused
by a self image of yourself as not fill in the blank
and for us with breakthroughs,
it's usually a self image of yourself
as not creative, not a genius,
not, in the valley, Steve Jobs.
So you can rebuild your self image
and you've got a couple of ways to do this.
The easiest one is gong to be
to decide which self image you want.
In this case, let's say
that you want to see yourself as creative.
Second, gather past evidence.
There's a couple of limitations in the brain
that are gonna come in handy here.
It doesn't have a great sense of imagination versus reality
as we've said.
It also doesn't have a great sense of time or scale.
Have you ever heard of the science of small wins?
So that is the fact that,
okay, have you ever had a day
where lots of little bad things happened one after the other
and you get the feeling
that it's just one darn thing one after the other
and somehow, that's harder to live through
than one big thing.
Have you ever had that experience?
That's because our brain doesn't prioritize super well.
It doesn't realize instinctively
what the different importances are.
So small acts of creativity stacked up
if there's lots of them,
it can seem the same to your brain
as one big creative breakthrough.
And we're just trying to change your self image
of how you see yourself with regards to breakthroughs.
Another thing that you'll want to do
if you use the science of small wins,
a good example, if you see my eyes glancing up,
by the way, I'm looking at the clock.
So another thing that you can do
using the science of small wins
is start really, really small.
B.J. Fogg who's here at Stanford with the what is it,
the Persuasion Lab, I think,
who has the method called tiny habits
which is absolutely fantastic
if you want to learn about rituals and routines
and habit stacking,
he's the guy to go to.
He recommends, for example,
that if you want to start flossing,
floss just one tooth.
That is how easy you want to make it.
In the same way,
if you want to change your self image,
and you want to have an image of your brain
as incredibly creative,
start really, really small.
You could, for example, look around your office
and start making up back stories for the objects there.
Like your photocopier,
his name is Phillip, he comes from Minnesota
and he's really big into ice hockey.
And you start building things,
you start from the really, really, really small
and you start stacking creative habits that way.
Fear, failure and the last one, of the obstacles
which is one of the biggest ones you'll face
and the one that we don't speak of often enough,
increasingly people do speak about how failure is important
and how you can go through it, et cetera,
but the way we handle uncertainty
is actually one of the biggest blockers
on the road to breakthroughs.
Have you ever had the feeling
that when you're waiting for a result
and the feeling that you'd rather even get bad news
rather than just being left in suspense?
That's our inability to deal with uncertainty.
Why do we have this issue with uncertainty?
It actually registers in the brain like physical pain.
It's a tension, a gap that must be resolved
before you can move forward.
And just like with fear and failure,
you can learn how to handle uncertainty,
you can practice uncertainty,
you can watch a horror movie or a mystery movie
and stop before the end
and then just sit and see what's happening inside of you
and learn how to handle your feelings.
There's a joke that meditators often say on retreat
which is don't just do something, sit there.
Often just sitting there,
not running away, not distracting yourself,
it's the most courageous thing you can do.
You can also use sports games.
You can go to a game,
you can watch a game on television
where you don't know the outcome
which is one of the things we love about games,
by the way,
and turn the television off or leave the game.
And then just handle the uncertainty.
That's a good way to practice.
You can reduce the uncertainty
by learning how to think like a poker player.
My favorite is Annie Duke.
She has a great website
with lots and lots of tips on there
and she has books and courses.
When you think like a poker player,
you're always thinking in probabilities.
And that can help you a, narrow down the range,
but also realizing that there's never 100%
or never a zero percent.
When Annie first started dating her boyfriend, now fiance,
they're all poker players, her, her brother,
they're all champions
and they've got the bracelets, et cetera,
turns out that her family started making bets
on whether they'd get married.
And so they actually named the option after the couple.
They think probabilistically about everything.
So we've talked about practicing,
we've talked about reducing
and the last one is balancing uncertainty.
You'd be surprised by how many very, very creative artists,
designers, dancers,
have taken their entire day
and dropped into routine from morning to evening
because we all have a certain threshold
above which our brain goes into this fight or flight mode
because there's too much uncertainty.
So it's almost as if you have a bucket, a scale
with a bucket of certainty on one hand
and uncertainty on the other.
You need uncertainty to have breakthroughs.
If you can't handle uncertainty,
you'll only do things that are guaranteed to work.
Therefore, that aren't innovative, that aren't new.
If you load the certainty bucket
with rituals, routines and habits as much as possible,
than you can handle more uncertainty on the other side.
Does that make sense?
Okay.
Last 30 seconds, three best tools
that will work for all of these.
One is a sense of purpose.
And when I say purpose,
not necessarily higher or altruistic purpose.
It's entirely, Hitler had a purpose.
It's entirely possible and very frequent
to have a purpose that is not altruistic.
But a sense of purpose
will give you the sense that you're on a mission.
My favorite example is Joan of Arc.
This is a when she started out
12 year old illiterate peasant girl who,
and this, believe me, in medieval France,
I'm French, I would know,
this was, still is, unheard of,
that not only she made her way to the French king,
not only convinced him to send her at the head of the army
but then convinced the French army
who hadn't made a single attempt in nine months
to mount five attacks in a couple of weeks.
And she changed the course of that war.
Imagine the difference
if she'd seen what she was doing as a project.
Instead, it was her mission, it was her purpose.
She turned that war into a holy crusade.
When you have a purpose,
it'll help you combat the fear and the sense of failure
and the uncertainty.
Now, if on top of the purpose, you add altruism,
then that's as close to a magic formula
as you'll ever get in breakthroughs.
And Adam Grant has a lot of wonderful research on altruism
which I highly recommend that you look into.
I'm pretty sure there's some of it on our website
along with a lot more brain research
for those of you who are hardcore geeks.
Altruism measurably boosts creativity
and it can also help you combat all of those three.
Lastly, meditation.
You've heard of it in all sorts of ways
so you know it's good for you.
Think of it not like a spiritual practice,
think of it as a toolbox.
You wouldn't use a hammer and a screwdriver
for the same purpose.
Well, you shouldn't use metta or vipassana in meditation
for the same purpose.
It's a toolbox.
There's a lot of sites you can learn about meditation.
I think that's it.
Thank you very much.
(audience applause)
- We're opening the floor for questions.
- [Male] So there's a destructive
as well as a constructive side about creativity.
Salvador Dali said, "the only difference
"between myself and a madman is that I am not mad."
You talk about trying to keep that element of creativity
in the constructive versus the destructive?
- Want me to get it?
Okay.
This is the idea when I use discipline.
You're kind of--
- Remember to repeat the question.
- Oh, sorry.
So the question was,
thank you.
The question was how to balance the destructive elements
of the creative process
and try and steer them towards being more constructive.
And when I spoke earlier about discipline in this process,
that's kind of what that is getting at.
It's very romantic
to want to just disappear into the default network
and just imagine all these wonderful things and float out
and not even think about the consequences of them,
just feel like this is what's important.
But the reality is is that we have to go in
and have that creative space,
and then come out and with a very clear eye,
a very logical, rational eye,
ask ourselves, what am I doing?
What is the purpose of what I'm doing?
So it's the lack of discipline around the creative process
that leads to the possibility of that destructiveness.
So there's this mythology we have about being creative
where you're just you're crazy and wild
and it just pours out of you like a fountain
and isn't that amazing?
And there are a lot of artists like that
and a lot of artists have been incredibly self destructive.
But if you gain the inner discipline around the creativity,
that's how you deal with that situation.
- [Female] At one point you mentioned
having an idea and then also having to work with it
and keep at it even if it's not the initial breakthrough.
How would you describe knowing when to bail on an idea?
How would you know when it's not worth putting in that,
it's not a good idea from the start?
Do you have any tips on deciphering that?
- So the question is
if you have an idea, you have a breakthrough,
and then you're working on it,
you're actually doing the discipline thing
and working on it,
how do you know when to toss in the towel on the idea?
It's an excellent question.
There is no exact answer.
And it depends on where you get information.
Some people will feel it in their bodies.
Some people will just know it's exhausting me
to keep working on this.
And at that point, I'm done.
Other people will feel kind of an intellectual wall.
They'll just realize, I'm just banging into a wall here.
Some people are gonna feel literally in your heart,
you're like, my heart's no longer in this,
I was very excited about it and now I'm not.
So there's a certain element of just listening to yourself
and asking yourself how you feel about this.
But another element is going back in.
So you don't just mode switch once.
You don't go into the default network,
come out, you have an idea, and then you work on it.
It's a dance that you're constantly moving back and forth.
So if you find yourself hitting a wall with an idea,
put it aside, leave it alone,
see if something comes to you later.
It might take a little while.
Screenwriters, novelists, painters,
everyone has a story
about taking a piece they're working on,
putting it in a drawer,
putting it under a bed,
coming back to it later,
when suddenly with fresh eyes they see something.
So again if you get into that executive network mode
and you're just trying to drill down on something
and it's not working,
that might be time to pull back.
- There's also something about your question
which is can you please give me a deadline,
I want to know for sure
and that's for a lot of us who work on it,
who are driven by the executive network,
we want a formula that'll tell us,
well at this point, you know
that it's no longer worth working on it.
And what we hate is the uncertainty
of not knowing when we should bail.
That's exactly what you need to learn how to handle
'cause unfortunately, I know you're gonna hate this,
but there isn't an answer.
And Judah's gonna give you all sorts of intuitive,
we've behaved very well up until now, I'm amazed.
Eight minutes, it can't go too far bad,
he's gonna give you all sorts of intuitive,
et cetera, et cetera,
for people like me, it drives me batshit crazy.
Sorry, unfortunately there is no hard answer on that one.
- [Male] So on the other side,
sometimes we come up with what we think is a breakthrough,
we think it's genius
and then the next day we think, what was I thinking,
was I chemically aided like Keith Richards
in coming up with the idea,
how did I get there?
And sometimes like this just slams on our ego,
the thing I thought was brilliant
it really is now just was a really poor choice
how do we sort of balance when we think something's great
and then we realize later, oh, not so great?
- Would it be fair to say that what you're asking
is how can we evaluate what we've just come up with,
whether it's, what's in your net?
- Okay, so there are a number of tools
and this is where you come out of that creative space
and actually look at your idea in the light of day.
And sometimes it's just having that hard and fast look
the next morning.
Sometimes it's having a crew that you run things by,
that you trust, that you feel safe with
and you go to them and you're like
so I have this idea,
I think it might be genius but it might be crap
and you know that they'll tell you the truth.
Another thing you can do is just try it.
I'm like, alright,
I'm gonna test this out and see what happens.
Sometimes what we do is we get attached to our ideas
and we treat them like very delicate flowers
and we don't ever expose them to reality
and that's how we get caught in that loop
which also goes back to the earlier question
of just taking your idea if you're stuck on it
and just put it out in the world
and see what the world does with it.
And that can sometimes shift you.
And sometimes, it's harsh and you're like,
wasn't that good of an idea.
And you're like oh, and you kinda want to slink away.
But that's sort of a part of it.
- [Male] Also, on the same side,
sometimes we have an idea that's a metaphor in your head
and it just comes
but then it's like a flash
but then you don't know how to start shaping it,
start working on it.
Is there any way we can start with?
How do you get that idea that it has any shape in your head?
- So the question is what happens
if you get a metaphor in your head,
if you get a sort of half formed idea in your head
and you can't get,
that's all it is,
it's this half formed metaphor?
How do you actually work with that?
- First of all, if you don't get metaphors, that's okay.
I hate metaphors.
Breakthroughs really, what you have to realize
is that of all the styles of breakthroughs,
and remember the four that we categorized
was just for ease of writing
but there's no one style of breakthrough
that's better than another.
He gets metaphorical breakthroughs,
I tend to get Eureka.
You've never had a Eureka breakthrough, have you?
- [Judah] No.
- No, he's terrible.
Occasionally, I'll get intuitive
just because I've been in this work so long.
Do you ever get intuitive?
- [Judah] I do.
- Really?
Anyway, so just realizing that all breakthrough styles
are equally worthy.
Take the metaphor.
- Okay, so if you have this metaphor
and you can't make heads or tails of it,
there's a couple of things you can do.
One, again, share it with people.
See what they say.
It's not that they're necessarily going to have the answer
but whatever they give you
will kind of shift your stuck place.
Another thing you can do
is look at the metaphor and ask yourself,
where's this coming from?
Is it something from my childhood,
is it something I read recently?
What's the meaning of this?
Read about it,
look into it,
research it.
It might prompt you into understanding
what is it that was shown to you.
And another possibility is take the metaphor
with your executive network
and focus your default network on it,
go back in,
see what happens if you just churn on the metaphor,
if something popped back out at you.
Those are the three main ways to try and engage it.
And sometimes, to go to the earlier point,
just not really an idea which happens a lot.
- [Male] Let's do one more question.
- One more question.
- [Male] Where do dreams come into play?
- Oh boy.
(audience laughter)
That's yours.
- So the question is
where do dreams come into play with this?
And the safe answer is it depends on who you ask.
Some people will tell you
dreams are just a random assortment of things going on
as your brain clears itself out from the day's occurrences.
Other people will tell you dreams are your unconscious way
of talking to yourself,
of giving you answers.
There are so many stories of people having breakthroughs
coming in dreams
that for me it's hard to ignore.
I personally don't know what the mechanism is
but the sheer number of people
that have woken up and been like, oh, that's my answer
from Einstein to Mendeleev to Pascal to,
it just goes on and on and on.
So from my point of view,
dreams are a time
when the default network is very, very active
and it's a kind of a metaphorical way
of the default network showing you a connection.
- And just also to say that we do talk
about the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states,
the liminal states between falling asleep and waking up
in which so many people seem to have great ideas.
It's okay if you don't.
I have never in my life woken up with a good idea.
I don't do naps well.
So apparently for a lot of people
taking a nap can get you feel refreshed.
I wake up I'm like a zombie, I crave marshmallows.
So I think what we'd really want to leave you with
is learn to work with your styles, your strengths.
You'll have your own signature breakthrough styles.
You'll have your own techniques that work for you
and there's no one magic formula.
I'd love it if there were.
He wouldn't.
But work with what works for you.
And I think that's
- [Judah] We're good.
- Yep.
- Alright thank you.
- Thank you.
(audience applause)
