🚨 Breaking news for creative minds of all kinds - neuroscientists have shed new light on how to tap into the elusive state of “flow” in a newly published study. 

There is ample pontification around how we access creative flow states—where time melts away and our performance becomes effortless. But it turns out that chasing flow may be a fool’s errand if you’re just starting out. 

In a study of 32 jazz guitar players, those who had a lot of musical expertise tapped into flow more often and more intensely than their less-practiced counterparts. 

Moreover, when researchers peeked into the musician’s brains, they saw that flow states were characterized by less activity in the “executive control” regions. This finding supports the idea that we have to bank many hours of practice before our brain is able to relax its control and trigger a flow state—a concept that’s been dubbed the “expertise-plus-release” theory of flow. 

So if you’re just starting out with a new creative endeavor, have patience—it may take some more practice before your brain is ready to go with the flow. 

Coming up in this week’s action-packed digest:

• ⛓️ A vital yet painful reminder on achieving creative breakthroughs gleaned from the dramatic battle to discover DNA’s code. 

• 🚀 The number one strategy that winning creative teams have in common according to Stanford University designers.

P.s., you can check out editions 1-5 here in case you missed them. Seriously, there are some gems you’ll appreciate in these early editions. ;-)

1. Good ideas must survive multiple bouts of scrutiny.

On one cold, November morning in 1951, two young physicists were having a heated exchange in an English train carriage. The older of the two, Francis Crick, was annoyed with his younger American counterpart, James Watson.

The pair were racing to become the first scientists to unravel the mysterious form and function of DNA. Should they succeed in becoming the first to crack the code, their names would forever go down in history. But they were up against much better funded and more experienced teams. Any mistake could cost them the race, and Watson had just made a big one.

Watson had recently attended a talk where crucial details about the water content of DNA were discussed. He was trying to relay the information to Crick but “my answers were frequently vague,” Watson confessed, “and Francis was visibly annoyed by my habit of always trusting to memory and never writing anything on paper.” “The possibility existed that I might be misleading Francis by an order of magnitude difference.”

Watson strained to offer a figure to the best of his recollection. Even though he wasn’t 100% sure it was accurate, the number seemed to click with Crick, because he began furiously scribbling away in his notebook. Then, after a few minutes, Crick made a surprise announcement: according to his new equations, they were perhaps a week away from solving DNA’s mystery! The next step was to hunt down the size of some inorganic ions, and so by midday they were running from bookstore to bookstore until they found the necessary textbook.

They were soon so confident about their model that they arranged a meeting to show it off in front of a group of their colleagues. But the demo turned out to be a disaster. The figure that Watson had provided Crick with in the train carriage was indeed off by a multiple of at least 10. Their demo was a waste of everyone’s time and made a fool out of their lab. The lab’s director was so furious that he banned both Watson and Crick from spending any more time on DNA, effectively bringing their quest to an end.

Watson continued to work away at the problem in secret but his efforts seemed futile. It was an endless cycle of hope and disappointment: “on a few walks our enthusiasm would build up to the point that we fiddled with the models when we got back to our office. But almost immediately Francis saw that the reasoning which had momentarily given us hope led nowhere.”

Twelve whole miserable months went by like this until the final nail in the coffin arrived from America. A famous researcher at Caltech claimed to have finally discovered the shape of DNA. The truth is that no one had expected Watson and Crick to succeed anyway. Their approach was childish—they had relied on using toy-like models to test their theories and hoped that tinkering would reveal the answer through sheer luck. Their theories were laughable—their colleagues responded to most of their ideas with snarky derision. And their characters were questionable—their disregard for authority frustrated landlords, sponsors, and fellow lab members alike.

Nonetheless, their hearts were heavy as they read the research report. But then, partway through, Watson’s heart leapt. He’d just spotted a glaring mistake! The Caltech researcher had made a fatal error just as they themselves had done a year prior—rendering his model dead wrong. Perhaps they could be the ones to solve DNA’s mystery after all!

Watson spent that whole summer pouring over research studies, textbooks, and anything that could possibly shed light on their puzzle. Then, as he sat one night doodling ideas, a promising structure snapped into place. It seemed perfect on paper but Watson knew it was vital to reconstruct it using the lab model before getting carried away.

But yet another obstacle emerged. It would take two days for a few of the model atoms to arrive at the lab. “This was much too long even for me to remain in limbo,” Watson recalled, “so I spent the rest of the afternoon cutting accurate representations of the bases out of stiff cardboard.” Once the cardboard shapes were ready, Watson assembled them together. As he looked down at the completed model he saw that the decades-long search for DNA was finally over. They’d cracked the code.

Watson & Crick’s story teaches us that good ideas, no matter how groundbreaking, are not self-actualizing. Even a concept as promising as DNA went through endless cycles of rejection, scrutiny, and iterative improvement before it could be willed into existence.

Even after their smartest colleagues chided their ideas, they kept going. Even after they were banned from pursuing the project, they kept going. Even after the 100th model was struck down as a failure, they kept going. How many would have done the same?

But the truth is that breakthroughs and bold leaps of progress demand that we keep going in the face of these challenges until our results finally speak for themselves.

And there is one additional trait that Watson & Crick embodied that proves vital for success…

We’ll leave you with this…

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