Welcome to the Action Digest, where you’ll find your next big idea landing smoother than a SpaceX booster being caught by giant chopsticks.

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

• 🧪 We get some strange reading advice from one of history’s most influential physicists. 

• 🪦 The designer of a controversial war memorial teaches us how to come up with winning ideas.

• ⚡️ Two Stanford professors reveal which evidence-backed brainstorming strategy yields the best results.

P.s., you can check out editions 1-34 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. Anyone who reads too much and uses their own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking

In 1929, a reporter named George Sylvester Viereck arrived at the home of Albert Einstein for a rare three hour sit down interview.

Viereck was expecting to find an eccentric apartment full of rare and heavy books.

To his surprise, Viereck found that Einstein’s study was uncluttered and contained few books.

This prompted Viereck to ask Einstein about his reading habits.

The journalist was not expecting the physicist’s response.

“Reading after a certain age,” Einstein advised, “diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theater is tempted to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.”

Viereck was surprised to find that, “whenever a question involving a difficult mathematical problem comes up, Einstein immediately takes up his pencil and covers page after page with the most intricate equations. He does not refer to a text-book; he works out such formulas immediately himself. Often the formula thus obtained is clearer, more comprehensible and more perfect than the equation that is found in the books of reference.”

It is all well and good for the great Albert Einstein to forego books in order to avoid “lazy habits of thinking,” but does this approach really make any sense for the rest of us?

The surprising answer is yes…

2. Leave ‘em sweating and stealing, a year and a half behind

Larry Ellison, the cofounder and CEO of Oracle, recently overtook Jeff Bezos to become the second richest person on the Forbes Realtime Billionaire list. 

Ellison was once asked what trait has made the biggest contribution to his success. “The single most important aspect of my personality,” Ellison responded, “in as far as determining my success—has been my questioning of conventional wisdom. My doubting of experts just because they’re experts and questioning authority. And while that can be very painful in terms of your relationship with your parents, and your relationship with your teachers, it’s enormously useful in life.”

You have to “think things out for yourself,” Ellison continues, “come to your own judgements. Don’t simply conform to conventional ways of thinking, conventional ways of dressing, conventional ways of acting. You have to really go back to first principles and think things out for yourself, whether they’re scientific principles, or moral principles, or business ideas, or product ideas, you have to think things out for yourself.” 

So Ellison took the same approach in business as Einstein did in science—but why is thinking things out for yourself so important? Well, David Oglivy, the marketing mogul we met last edition, also had a rule about being original.

He called this rule, “Don’t Be A Copy-Cat,“ and as he explains it…

“Rudyard Kipling wrote a long poem about a self-made shipping tycoon called Sir Anthony Gloster. On his death bed the old man reviews the course of his life for the benefit of his son, and refers contemptuously to his competitors: 

They copied all they could follow, 

but they couldn’t copy my mind, 

And I left ‘em sweating and stealing, 

a year and a half behind. 

If you ever have the good fortune to create a great advertising campaign, you will soon see another agency steal it. This is irritating, but don’t let it worry you; nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else’s advertising.”

The reason that thinking for yourself is so important is that it’s the only way to lead the pack. The only way for an individual, a team, or an organization to become the best is to discover superior ways of doing things. But superior ways of doing things can only be unearthed by original thinkers. Unoriginal thinkers, meanwhile, are doomed to be “left sweating and stealing, a year and a half behind.”

Your competitors and contemporaries might be able to steal what you’ve done, but they can’t steal where you’re going (unless they too are thinking for themselves!). 

So if original thinking is so beneficial, why do so few engage in it? 

3. I find it the most difficult thing for me to do, but when I’m done I am unbelievably just at peace

In 1979, an American war veteran proposed that a monument should be built in Washington, D.C. to honor those who died in the Vietnam War. 

A competition was launched to find the best design for the memorial and a record breaking 1,432 submissions flooded in. 

The winning design chosen by a panel of eight experts looked nothing like typical memorials of the day: it was a minimalist, V-shaped black granite wall that descends into the earth, inscribed with the names of the fallen. 

But there was something else that was unique about this competition. 

The entries were submitted anonymously. 

The judges had no idea who was behind the winning design until after it had been selected. 

So most people were shocked when they discovered that the designer was Maya Lin, a 21-year-old college student with no professional experience. 

Adding to the controversy, Lin’s Asian heritage stirred anger among some Americans and led to protests against the design. But despite the uproar, the selection was deemed final—Lin had won the competition fair and square. 

Unfortunately, much of the debate overshadowed the thoughtful, meticulous process that allowed Lin to rise above over 1,000 other entries, even as a young, unknown designer.

When Lin started her design, “not much was known about the actual competition” she recalls, so she was “left without concrete directions for what ‘they’ were looking for or even who ‘they’ were.”

Lin took another counterintuitive approach, “I made a conscious decision not to do any specific research on the Vietnam War and the political turmoil surrounding it. I felt that the politics had eclipsed the veterans, their service, and their lives. I wanted to create a memorial that everyone would be able to respond to, regardless of whether one thought our country should or should not have participated in the war.”

So if Lin didn’t study the competition guidelines or research the War, what did she do? Lin simply visited the site of the proposed memorial and started to form her own impressions and ideas. 

“I had a simple impulse to cut into the earth,” Lin recalls, “I imagined taking a knife and cutting into the earth, opening it up, an initial violence and pain that in time would heal. The grass would grow back, but the initial cut would remain a pure flat surface in the earth with a polished, mirrored surface, much like the surface on a geode when you cut it and polish the edge. The need for the names to be on the memorial would become the memorial; there was no need to embellish the design further. The people and their names would allow everyone to respond and remember. It would be an interface, between our world and the quieter, darker, more peaceful world beyond. I chose black granite in order to make the surface reflective and peaceful. I never looked at the memorial as a wall, an object, but as an edge to the earth, an opened side. The mirrored effect would double the size of the park, creating two worlds, one we are a part of and one we cannot enter. The two walls were positioned so that one pointed to the Lincoln Memorial and the other pointed to the Washington Monument. By linking these two strong symbols for the country, I wanted to create a unity between the nation’s past and present.”

Each design feature of the memorial was born from an original thought that had occurred to Lin as she observed and considered the site of the memorial for herself. Lin has since relied on this approach to creativity for all of her designs to great success. 

“There’s no way of really saying, if A, then B, or A plus B equals C in creativity,” Lin explains, “and I think the true strength of the creative arts is that you allow yourself to think about something.” “You have to say—what is it? What should that be? What do I want to do here? What would I like to accomplish? What are the goals? And I tend to almost sketch an idea sometimes with text. I’ll write. I’ll sit down and I’ll just write what I think I want, what I want to say here. What needs to be said, how to do it. I find it the most difficult thing for me to do, but when I’m done I am unbelievably just at peace. I would say sometimes if you think about art as being able to share your thoughts with another, it’s totally pure.” 

Thinking through how to approach something can be, as Lin puts it, one of the most difficult things for us to do. But while wrestling with all of the questions and possibilities can be taxing and uncomfortable—on the other side of that struggle is where all winning ideas are found. 

How, then, can we make original thinking more of a habit?

Stanford professors have a suggestion for us, but first…

4. Dozens of high-performers have these two things in common

We’ve now studied the creative process of dozens of people at the top of their field together. 

Actors, musicians, writers, architects, leaders, athletes, scientists—you name it. 

What do they all have in common? 

A lot! 

But two things stand out: 

1. They think deeply - they explore many more ideas and possibilities on average before taking action.
   

2. They act boldly - when they’re done thinking, they organize their ideas, become crystal clear on their next move, and act fast. 

The tricky part is that these two “modes” of creativity are naturally oppositional. 

It can be tough switching back and forth between them efficiently. 

That’s where the Action Book comes in handy. 

It’s designed to mirror the way high-performers think and streamline the both sides of the creative process. 

How?

By separating them. 

• On the left, a space for deep, unfiltered exploration. Sketch, doodle, mind map, or jot down every thought that comes to you. No rules. No constraints. Just a place to let your ideas breathe.

• On the right, a place to focus. To consolidate. Here’s where you bring clarity to your vision. Break down your next steps into clear, actionable tasks. Check them off one by one and watch your ideas come to life.

It gives you the freedom to think without limits—and the structure to turn those thoughts into bold action.

Elevate your creativity and order a fresh copy today.

We’ll leave you with this…

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