Where Do Insights Come From?
What is your wildest dream?
“I want to make an impact.”
“I want to start a business.”
“I want to become a world class coach.”
“I want to do a podcast.”
My three friends and I shared over Zoom. These ideas sounded exciting, but also doable. Doable not in the sense that we could achieve it tomorrow, but with hard work and a bit of creativity, we would all get to where we wanted to go.
As we continued to talk, I became more detached from the highly engaging conversation. Not detached because I was distracted, but because I was thinking. I’d had an insight.
I must have been listening to Taylor Swift that morning because about one hour and thirty minutes into the free-flowing conversation I was ready to interrupt. “Guys, I don’t think anything we have shared is particularly revelatory.”
Through the camera I could see everybody sit up a bit straighter. Their smiles faded, mildly offended that their visions for the future were being called easy.
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“Team, when you think about everything that we’ve shared here, and you think about all the ideas that you have kept in your brain and not shared with anyone. Maybe you have never even said this stuff out loud. What is your wildest dream?”
I let the lyrics to Taylor Swift’s Wildest Dreams ring around my head as they took the question in:
Even if it's just in your wildest dreams, ah-ah, ha
Wildest dreams, ah-ah, ha
Where do insights come from?
An insight never comes slowly. It happens in an instant. Like a click of your fingers or a light bulb coming on inside your brain. When you have an insight, you look at the world in a different way, you see a new version of the future. When this happens, you get smarter.
Depth
It sounds obvious to say this, but the baseline of insight is deep work. If you want to have an insight about your work, you need to spend significant amounts of time going deep into your work. Once you have done that then you have to oscillate into the prescriptions below.
Prescription 1: Rest
One of our biggest and most reliable sources of insights is sleep. We’ve written before how sleeping acts as both “overnight therapy” and a source of creativity. When we are sleeping, we are allowing our brain to switch from the busy dealings of the day to creative brainstorming at night. Failing daytime naps, we can access these insightful parts of our mind through non-work: exercise, meditation, reflection. In this rest we experience silence, and out of a quiet mind comes insight. I attended a talk with Yuval Noah Harari last year and he said:
“New wisdom comes from silence. Not from repeating what you already know.”
Prescription 2: Exploration
It’s a common myth to say backpackers go from Europe to Asia to “find themselves.” There isn’t smoke without fire, people really do go and come back with a new way of looking at themselves or the world around them – an insight. Failing jumping on a plane, explore a different part of where you live, or pick up a book you wouldn’t ordinarily read. After all, exploration is more of a mindset than a postcode.
Prescription 3: New People
If you’re lucky like me, the world was never the same after you met your life partner. I learnt more by spending my time with this person from a different world than I did over years with my school friends. It isn’t a slight against school friends, we grew up together, in the same place, doing the same things, it is natural that we look at the world in a monochrome way. Failing finding a life partner tomorrow, reach out to those people who are in your extended network – you will learn ten times more from the people at the edge of your universe than those sat next to you.
Prescription 4: Length of Discussion
When we talk for thirty minutes, we just repeat what we already know, it is only when we talk for three hours that we unlock new ideas. As a culture we are obsessed with having meetings in thirty minutes. To truly generate insights, spend prolonged periods of time with interesting people – much like we did on the Zoom call.
Prescription 5: Hilarity of Discussion
18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant was known for his legendary dinner parties. He started by asking everyone to share a story. Sharing stories changes the course of the discourse from idle conversation to DMC (Deep Meaningful Chat).
After the intimacy building DMC, he moved the table to debate. He would choose a topic all are emotionally invested in – immigration, the economy, work – and set a simple rule: “we can’t stop until we achieve some clarity.”
The third stage: hilarity – anything to make his guests laugh. Kant knew genuine insight doesn’t come from just plumbing the depths of discourse alone. It comes from the constant oscillation between deep clarity and carefree hilarity.
Prescription 6: Take Notes
Bill Gates bought one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks – the Codex Leicester – for $31m. Leonardo filled every inch of his parchment, scribbling ideas for painting and inventions side by side. We are all prone to believing our memory is better than it actually is. We do things brilliantly all the time, we have insights all the time, yet we often forget them as soon as we come upon the next distraction. Why leave it up to chance? Note it down.
Please spend more than five minutes doing these things.
The more extreme you take this, the deeper the insights you will have. Open Instagram and somebody will tell you that all you need to do to improve your life is to do something for five minutes. It might help you become happier, but will it help you contribute to humanity’s greatest challenges? Of course it won’t.
If you want to truly elevate your life, to live your wildest dream, you need to deliberately dedicate significant amounts of time to it. This means dedication in deep work. If you want to write a book, don’t just do it for ten minutes in the morning, spend some of your annual leave and take yourself on a writing retreat. If you want a promotion at work, skip the beers and spend your time learning and growing.
The same is true for the rest, exploration, discussion, hilarity and note taking. Do you really think that meditating for five minutes will unlock your mind? It might chill you out, but will it help you plumb the recesses? Nope. I’m sorry but the world is changing faster than ever, we need to stop pretending that the fix is easy. It is simple. But it isn’t easy.
That day on the Zoom call, we didn’t just have a light bulb moment, we had a collective-explosion-of-lightning-bolts-moment. It was amazing. Suddenly, the shackles were off:
“I want to contribute to solving humanity’s biggest issues.”
“I want to create a start up in the AI music space.”
“I want to democratise the coaching process, making it accessible to all income levels.”
“I want to create an interactive documentary that goes to all corners of the world.”
Your wildest dream isn’t found in a plan or a checklist. It begins with an insight. One spark of change that lights the path to everything that comes next.
Deepen Your Curiosity
Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci is a monumental deep dive into one of history’s most fascinating thinkers.
