Steve Jobs had a maxim: if a problem becomes a liability, go for a walk. “Taking a long walk was his favorite way to have a serious conversation,” said Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson. “We spent a lot of time together walking quietly.“, also recalled Jony Ive, who is already building his own empire. When things were bad, Jobs would walk around. Sometimes barefoot, sometimes in flip-flops.
In any case, this wandering forced him to leave the office, not to sit down. Ndollarscience agrees: walking improves brain function. Mithu Storoni, a ndollarscientist trained at the University of Cambridge, documented this in her book “Hyperefficient: Optimize your brain to transform the way you work.”
Walking as a solution to finding solutions to problems
Scientific evidence states that walking is consistently beneficial for your health. Although balance is determined by a series of different variables for each person, a range between 8,000 and 10,000 steps per day invariably implies improved health. Reduces the risk of type 2 diabetes mellitus, cognitive decline and dementia, and also improves mental well-being, sleep and longevity, circulatory, cardiopulmonary and immunological function. There, it’s nothing. Steve Jobs knew this.
“As soon as my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow,” said novelist Henry David Thoreau. Friedrich Nietzsche agreed with him: “all truly good ideas were conceived while walking.” This is not just a maxim of the Peripatetic School: ideas flow through movement. Walking is the habit of the philosopher, the poet and the artist.
Steve Jobs hated meetings and even had a rule, the pizza rule, for whether they were productive or not. He also believed that giving everyone space promoted a good atmosphere. He was, in general, a cerebral man who took care of every detail. However, Steve Jobs was not a ndollarscientist. He was aware of some of the comparative literature of his time, but Many of his decisions were the result of his instinct, of his own impulses.
Storoni, on the other hand, agrees with other colleagues like Shane O’Mara and agrees: “I have a few clients and… a CEO made a rule: if he sits at his computer with a problem he hasn’t solved, solves it for 10 minutes, leaves his office and goes for a walk,” as he describes it for the Harvard Business Review podcast.
Physical effort does not require other physical effort. You can’t ask a mason to stop climbing stairs to walk. This rule applies to more sedentary jobs. But still, take a measured walk It involves distancing yourself, tempering your nerves, rethinking things. It is the ideal way to promote a more open and relaxed state of mind, in which the mind makes different connections, favoring this type of lateral thinking supported by Storoni.
What is the 10 minute rule?
The 10-minute rule suggests that if you have spent the last ten minutes thinking about a solution to a problem and it hasn’t come to you, get up, pause your brain and walk for at least the same amount of time. This rule is therefore a kind of fight where we move away from our “most stressful thoughts”.
Walking encourages you to think about something old while preventing you from obsessively thinking about a single idea. The typical thing: you go around in circles around something that upsets you. Well nothing, Hurry up and take an ecological path, a pedestrian path and go out as far as your body asks you.: “You can’t dwell on it because your attention can’t focus on a problem for long, because you also have to be careful about where you walk,” Storoni emphasizes.
Today we joke with hackneyed expressions like “less is more” and emphasize that the right approach is “more is more.” However, this trend is generally counterproductive in the long term.: A day of rest during a five-day workday has proven to be more useful than working non-stop. The objectives are better defined: at Apple, they even invented a sort of memo to document it.
If something doesn’t go as it should, maybe you should stop blaming yourself and go for a walk. So as a model. After ten minutes of trying, you can no longer consider that you are wasting your time. When you return, everything will be different.
Cover image | Anonymous photo of Steve and Laurene, walking in the hills surrounding Stanford with their son Reed; end of 2006.
In Applesfera | Steve Jobs’ daily routine as he strove to maintain that necessary balance between maximum concentration and relaxation
In Applesfera | Steve Jobs had the key to being more productive at work. A simple word that hides a lot of meaning
