10/19/26
STORY
The day before a virtual keynote, the event organizer reached out asking for a favor.
“We have to adjust our programming, so can your keynote be 40 minutes instead of 1 hour?”
I replied saying “Yes”, but I had no clue how I was going to do it.
I was stressed out.
How could I cut 20 minutes out of a carefully curated one-hour talk without it feeling rushed?
To make matters worse, it was also a very busy day.
I only had a few hours in the afternoon to figure this out since the keynote was the next morning.
At 4pm, I was sitting in my home office, staring at my laptop, feeling completely stuck.
I stood up and went to my whiteboard, hoping to flesh things out, and I was getting nowhere.
It was now 5pm, my wife was on her way home for dinner, and I made zero progress.
Right before my wife got home, I realized what I needed to do.
She walked in, and I said to her, “Sweetheart, is it okay if we have dinner a bit later, maybe around 6:30pm? I need to take a long walk.”
She was totally supportive.
I left my house and headed to the park nearby.
I didn’t bring anything with me.
No phone, no tablet, no notepad, nothing.
As I walked, I just let my mind go free.
I wasn’t thinking arduously about content; I was simply asking myself the important questions and seeing where the answers took me.
“What’s most important to this audience?”
“If they can leave with one actionable strategy, what would it be?”
“What story is the most valuable one that aligns with that strategy?”
Questions like this shed light on what needed to be in the talk, and what could be deleted or simplified.
Most importantly, the movement paired with being outside in nature created space for solutions to be discovered.
When I was sitting in my office, I was trying too hard to solve the problem using my “task-oriented” mind.
When I went out for a walk, I let go of that and accessed the part of my mind that could tap into creative solutions.
At 6:15pm, I walked into my house knowing exactly what needed to be done to deliver the talk in 40 minutes.
I went to my office, opened the deck, made a few tweaks, and sat at the dinner table at 6:30pm feeling totally at ease.
The next morning, I delivered the keynote in under 40 minutes, and it was a huge success.
So next time you’re feeling stuck, stressed out, or caught in overanalyzing…
The best thing you can do is to step away and let your mind go free.
Rather than make a super-focused face with furrowed eyebrows and a clenched jaw while typing away on your laptop…
Step outside, relax your body and mind, and trust that you’re going to figure it out.
Take a long walk…
Go for a drive…
Or engage in an enjoyable hobby (like gardening, woodwork, sudoku puzzles, etc.).
What you’ll find is that freeing your mind is the most effective strategy to tap into your creativity and solve the most difficult problems.
OBSERVATION
(This observation was written with the help of AI)
Researchers Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz at Stanford tested what walking does to creative thinking. They had people come up with new uses for everyday objects, first while sitting and then while walking. 81% of participants were more creative while walking. In later experiments, the boost carried over even after people sat back down, and walking outside produced the most original, highest-quality ideas of all. The catch is that walking helped with open-ended, free-flowing thinking, but not with problems that have one right answer.
(Oppezzo & Schwartz, Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2014)
STRATEGY
If at any point you’re feeling stuck this week…
Experiment with what I call “mindfreeness”, which is a practice of intentionally freeing your mind to explore, imagine, connect ideas, and discover new possibilities.
Whether it’s taking a walk…
Going for a long drive…
Or enjoying a creative hobby…
Use that time to let your mind go free.
Don’t be surprised if the answer you’ve been looking for magically appears!
Rooting for you,
Jay (inviting you to free your mind)
Global keynote speaker
Host of the “Unstuck” podcast
Both astounded and confused by Tesla’s flying car (it’s so impressive, but how would you ever use those thrusters?)
