by Howard Langner, Texas Main Street Architect
This is a blog post about getting out of the office and walking. Don’t worry, I’m not going to talk about health issues, and I’m not going to talk about more face-time with your property and business owners. Rather, I’m going to be talking about the creative power of walking.
I have always enjoyed walking as a simple, cheap form of exercise; no formal classes, no membership fees. So, I was rather surprised to discover that walking has an entirely different benefit going for it as well and that is it sparks creativity!
I first became aware of this when I read the recent Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. Isaacson describes how Jobs was not only known for being the cofounder of Apple Computer but he was also known for his long walks in Palo Alto. Jobs claimed that while walking was useful for exercise, it also helped him to contemplate, problem-solve, and it even proved to be an effective way to hold important meetings, free of boardroom formalities. Other documented walkers have found that it didn’t necessarily matter whether it was a quick five minute jaunt or a 3 mile trek, the results were usually positive; better thinking, getting more accomplished, relating better to others, and living longer.
So, what’s behind all these claims? Is there proof that walking makes you more creative? Yes, there is. A recent study (http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xlm-a0036577.pdf) from Stanford University researchers Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz, found that the act of walking, whether indoors or outdoors similarly boosted creative inspiration. “Across the board, creativity levels were consistently and significantly higher for those walking compared to those sitting.” The findings showed that walking increased creativity for 81% of participants with participants increasing their creative output by an average of 60%. Without going into excessive detail, I will relay that the test evaluated not only the number of ideas, but also “the number of wholly distinct ideas, the originality of ideas, and specificity of ideas”. The researchers were able to determine whether or not the extra ideas generated while walking were “junky, far-fetched, or irrelevant”. What they found was the ideas generated were of a high quality: both innovative and practical.
Let’s go back to Steve Jobs for a moment as he seems to be what sparked the current interest in walking and its relationship to creativity. It turns out that there are a few other famous people who are or were known for their strict adherence to walking. Contemporary figures include Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Square’s Jack Dorsey, both who have claimed walking as the best way to enable deep thinking and conversation. But there are other creative minds from history who have experienced the benefits of walking including the scientist Charles Darwin, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the writer Charles Dickens, and the composer Ludwig von Beethoven.
Darwin took three 45 minute walks per day: the first before breakfast, the second before lunch, and the third in the early evening. At the beginning of each day he would stack flint stones at the entrance of the pathway, knocking one over every time he completed a lap. Through the course of this routine, Darwin would come to theorize and refine his theory of a single ancestor, natural selection, and random mutation which was compiled into his revolutionary work On the Origin of the Species.
Nietzsche is regarded as one of the most original thinkers in modern history. Every day, he walked up a 1,400’ foot hill near his home and was known to walk seven or eight hours in the mountains of Eze, France “without a trace of weariness”.
Dickens was said to have found the process of writing to be emotionally draining and “frequently painful”. He wrote “If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish.” Dickens walked at least 12 miles per day and often walked at night when he couldn’t sleep. It was during his late night walks through the streets of London that he encountered some of the real life characters that he fictionalized for his great stories.
Beethoven would spend countless early morning hours composing music but he frequently interrupted his writing with quick walks outside. He stopped working at midday every day then took a long, solitary walk in the woods of Vienna, Austria where he was duly inspired to write more music.
So, what can we mere mortals do throughout the course of our Main Street careers to boost creativity? Take walking meetings outside as much as possible, especially the one-on-ones that don’t require access to a computer. Set aside a distinct time of day when walking is seen as your “thinking” time. See if it doesn’t start to get the creative juices flowing. Take along that pencil and pad for note taking and give your colleagues and merchants a heads-up that they should keep their walking shoes handy when you show up.