Shower Brilliance and The Power of Mindless Activities

Some Context

Greetings everyone from beautiful Krabi, Thailand! I have been doing some traveling recently, but have been reading your comments on my most recent video.

Firstly, it is so amazing that all of you have been so engaged with the topic. It seems that many of us have shower thoughts or amazing ideas when doing other activities. I have been giving this topic a lot of attention recently since I have been wandering around Southeast Asia and have been having many thoughts of my own.

What Getting Great Ideas In The Shower Actually Means

So let’s get started. As I mentioned in my video, many of us tend to get great ideas while we’re in the shower. But it’s not the shower itself that is creating these amazing ideas, but rather it’s the state that the shower is putting us in (incubation, default mode network… things that are explained in my video 😉).

But I think there is a bigger concept here that I wish to cover in this newsletter. A more human concept that can be applied day-to-day. And that is the scientific understanding that you are more likely to creatively think, get your best ideas, solve that problem WHEN you walk away and do something else.

Many times, we like to believe that if we work extra hours, stare at a problem longer, and concentrate harder that eventually we will force our way to do our best thinking. But this has been proven not to be true. In fact, what should be interesting to us is that the exact opposite is true.

Backpacking Through Asia

As I mentioned before, I have been backpacking through Southeast Asia for the past several weeks. It’s beautiful here and I’ve been enjoying the scenery, culture, people, and food (ooooof the food is too good).

But it actually comes at a time in my life where I need to step back and do some thinking. I recently moved back to the US from Spain and I’ve been curious about what my next step will be. What will I do? What should I work on? Where should I go?

When I moved back to the US, I thought these ideas would come to me in an instant. That somehow moving back home would reveal all the answers to me.

It did the opposite.

Instead, I found myself sitting in my room trying to force myself to come up with my next great revelation. Since I had nothing going on, I had a lot of time to think about life and my goals.

And you know what? Despite having all the time in the world, it didn’t lead to much.

I found myself spiraling and ruminating and not having any interesting or new ideas about myself. I was stressing myself out and found myself in a deep hole of not-so-valuable brainstorming. You could even say it created a true storm in my brain.

Revelation About Revelations

I created the script for my shower thoughts video before I left for this trip and I wasn’t expecting to find the meaning behind the shower video on this journey. There is something about wandering to a new place and walking aimlessly that just gives you a lot of clarity and gets rid of “brain block”.

I’ve basically been an idea machine since I left the US for this trip and it could be one of the best things I could have done to get out of the rut I was in. I was not expecting it.

Someone once told me something like “small ideas belong inside and big ideas belong outside”. I don’t believe there is any scientific merit to that, but there might be something to the idea that if you’re stuck mentally… don’t be stuck physically. Do anything.

Now I am fortunate enough to be on this huge trip, but that does not mean that anybody has to go to this sort of extreme. It could mean just leaving your desk and going for a long walk. Or doing something creative and mindless.

Giving Yourself Space

Many of us have demanding jobs that require 8 hour work days (at least). More and more of us are having to go in the office 5 days a week again. Given this structure, it’s easy for us to fall into the trap of just grinding out 8 hours of work and expecting ourselves to be brilliant. In fact, maybe your manager expects brilliance out of you every single day!

But we don’t work like this. I do not work like this. There needs to be a balance of getting up and moving around. Room for spontaneity and inspiration.

When I lived in Madrid, I used to go on these long runs in Retiro Park after work. Not only did it clear my head, but many of the problems I was trying to solve at work would often reveal themselves during this routine (very convenient timing might I add).

Teams will often have “brainstorming meetings” that are 60, 90, or even 120 minutes long. I know I’ve been in some meetings where the whole premise of the meeting was “by the end of this meeting, we will have come up with the solution to this critical problem”.

Guess what? It never truly happened.

Instead what usually happened was that someone was out with their kids or cooking later in the day and suddenly had the idea that was ACTUALLY useful to us.

There’s something here.

Wrap-Up

These newsletters have become fun for me because I get to ramble to all of you about my inner thoughts on my most recent content. I have to animate everything in my videos and that takes a lot of time, so they’re never really never as long as I want them to be!

But I really do have to wrap this up, so just to drive this point home:

Shower thoughts are not just about the shower.

One more time for good measure?

Shower thoughts are just a way to describe the state that your brain tends to be in for creative thinking (which tends to happen to many of us IN the shower).

Hopefully this clears up some confusion in my comment section. Okay now that we’re all on the same page, I think we can really learn from this.

Don’t try to come up with a great idea, do something enjoyable.

Don’t try to not overthink something, just do anything else.

Don’t lock yourself in your room and expect to have the most groundbreaking idea, more than likely it won’t happen.

If I’ve learned anything in these last weeks, it’s that your brain needs room to breathe and make new connections. You could be smarter than Archimedes, but even Archimedes needed to take a bath to finally get to one of his greatest ideas.

Let’s give it a try.

-Carlos

If you enjoyed reading this newsletter, consider sharing it with all the people in your life! Or maybe even just a coworker that is stuck at their desk too often.

I run on coffee, so if you would like to support the channel you can buy me a coffee here ☕️