Welcome to the Action Digest, where you’ll find more action than a taco truck at a music festival.

A glimpse at the action we’re bringing you this week:

• 🧠 The weird insight that a neuroscientist learned from a music producer for finding great ideas.

• 🏖️ A technique for high performance relied upon by an award winning mathematician, an academy award winning actor, and a tech billionaire.

• 💊 The innovative work schedule that a supplement company is using to achieve work-life balance and make faster progress at the same time.

P.s., you can check out editions 1-31 here in case you missed them, including insights such as the mindset that helped an entrepreneur build seven different billion-dollar companies, how Steve Jobs cultivated great creative taste, and why success might be much closer than we thought possible.

Seriously, there are some gems you’ll appreciate in these earlier editions ;-)

1. When you keep your body still, and your mind is really active, amazing ideas come forward.

After professor Andrew Huberman interviewed the hit music producer Rick Rubin on his podcast, the pair decided to hang out in person. But “it was,” as the professor describes it, “the weirdest visit ever.” 

They treaded water in the morning, listened to a podcast together, “and then we would just like… sit around,” Huberman reveals. “And I'm like, ‘what are you gonna do?’ He's like, ‘well, let's just like sit.’ And we would just sit with our eyes closed. And I was like… ‘alright.’ Then we have lunch, and then he was like, ‘well, let's just sit.’ And then at one point, I'm like, ‘Rick, what are we doing?’ And he's like, ‘well, when you keep your body still, and your mind is really active, amazing ideas come forward.’ And that's when I was like, ‘oh my goodness,’ because my first guest on my podcast was a guy named Carl Deisseroth. He's the world's best bioengineer. He's a psychiatrist. He raised five kids. He's a phenom. He'll probably win a Nobel Prize. And he told me his practice of coming up with ideas is, after his kids are asleep at night, [he] sits down and he keeps his body completely still, and he forces himself to think in complete sentences, keep his mind super active. And I was like, wow. And it turns out that if you look historically, a number of scientists have talked about this, a number of creatives have talked about this.” 

In light of this revelation, professor Huberman took up a new habit: “I've started trying to do a sort of meditation where I force myself to be very bodily still with my mind very active.” 

Moments of quiet, boredom, and stillness were common for most of human history. Today, we have an infinite stream of stimulation, whether it be podcasts, visual media, or news feeds, that have quietly usurped every period of idleness. But perhaps we pay an invisible cost for this constant input—an erosion of the mental space necessary for creativity and deep thinking.

No matter what industry you study, those at the top seem to champion the value of total detachment… 

2. I still more or less wait for the moment

Earlier this year, Claire Voisin became the first woman to be awarded the Crafoord Prize in Mathematics. Over her 50 years of practice, Voisin has crafted a simple process to achieve her groundbreaking mathematical discoveries.

“I am a professional mathematician, so my working day is officially organized around mathematics,” Voisin explains, “I sit at a desk; I work on a computer. But most of my math activity does not happen during that time. You need a new idea, a good definition, a statement that you think you’ll be able to exploit. Only then can your work start. And that does not happen when I am at my desk. I need to follow my mind, to keep myself thinking.”

Detachment is not just a supporting role for Voisin, it is the primary engine of insight. 

“I don’t find it to be easy,” she continues, “but what I discovered is that at some moments — like in the morning over breakfast, or when I am walking through the streets of Paris or doing something mindless like cleaning — my brain starts working by itself. I realize that I am thinking about mathematics, without having intended to. It’s like you are dreaming. I am 62, and I have no real method for doing good mathematics: I still more or less wait for the moment when I get some inspiration.”

If much of our best thinking takes place when our minds are allowed to wander, free of external stimulation, then how many problems will go unsolved if we lose the capacity to sit with stillness? Perhaps protecting our daily moments of detachment is one of the highest returns on investment we can obtain.

Perhaps this helps to explain why, for some high performers, only radical detachment will suffice… 

3. The harder the sprint, the longer the rest

Daniel Day Lewis has won more academy awards for best actor than anyone else. He is notorious for going to extraordinary lengths to prepare for a role. But what Lewis does after finishing a role has received far less attention, even though it is just as remarkable.

After winning his first academy award, he took a three year break from acting. After filming The Boxer in 1997, he took a longer, five year break before appearing in Gangs of New York in 2002. And he took yet another five year long break after filming Lincoln in 2012 before starring in his final film, Phantom Thread in 2017.

When Lewis was asked why he walks away for such long periods, rather than trying to ride the momentum of his successes, he explained: “There’s no thought process behind it, but there’s a very strong sense, which I think I’ve been blessed with from an early age, of my own rhythm… But from my point of view, these two things are mutually dependent on each other. I cannot do the work I love to do unless I take time away from it. In the time taken away from it when – god forbid – I reengage with life, it allows me to do the work, in hopes that I might bring something to that work.”

In other words, Lewis engages with life in order to breathe life into his work. Sometimes doing our best work requires us to spend more time not working. If the goal is to maintain high quality output then the following equation applies: the harder the sprint, the longer the rest.

4. Some things, I say to myself: hey, I just need to think

“When I was your age, I didn't believe in vacations. I didn't even believe in weekends. I pushed everyone around me to work very long hours.”

That quote is from Bill Gates. 

It highlights the extreme approach he took towards work in his twenties. But even Gates, for all his intensity, would come to embrace the power of detachment.

When he took to the stage in at a CEO Summit 2008 to talk about the principles that have contributed to Microsoft’s success, he concluded his presentation with “a final approach” that has “really become important over the years.” 

It “is what we call: think week.” 

For his early think weeks, Gates would travel to a remote cabin in the fjords of Washington and spend one week there alone, reading and thinking. It became a longstanding tradition that he practices to this day. 

Gates shows up to his cabin with stacks of books, technical papers, and a list of predefined topics to explore. “You write down these things to think about,” Gates explains, “When will low interest rates end? Why isn’t the clinic working better? Ok, the private sector is good at this, do they have capacity? How many cities is this going to get into? How do we do the safety tests? Have we really underestimated this? What is in human sewage? And then you think, OK, do I need to read some books about that? Who do I need to talk to about that? And some things, I say to myself: hey, I just need to think.” 

After discovering the value of think weeks, Gates rolled them out across Microsoft. “Now what we’ve done is taken the broad technical community, the top 50 engineering thinkers in the company and they all participate.” “We’ve institutionalized it as kind of a grass roots process and this is a way that someone who’s even just a year or two into the company and has ideas that may or may not relate to the group they’re in, can write something up, and there’s great examples which we highlight so that it encourages more and more of it where those things come in and make a big difference.”

All great endeavors generate large and complex questions that must be wrestled with in order to succeed. But these questions may go ignored and unanswered unless we set aside dedicated time for their exploration.

This understanding has led some companies to dramatically rethink the way they work…

5. Working with a bias towards action is the ultimate competitive advantage

When you study the world’s most prolific creatives, athletes, business leaders, etc, you see the same pattern over and over again.

Working with a bias towards action is the ultimate competitive advantage.

That means always knowing your next move. And it means building a habit of turning your ideas and notes into action steps.

The Action Method product line, designed by a research team devoted to optimizing productivity, was made to optimize working with a bias towards action.

Each page includes a dedicated Action Zone that encourages you to stay action-oriented.

That means getting more done, seeing more results, and feeling more satisfaction.

You can pick up or replenish your supply here. 

We’ll leave you with this…

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