There’s a highly successful and well-paid management consultant who, whenever he gets in a stressful pickle at work, solves his problems by sitting down to do needlepoint.
This is according to a book I am reading to better myself. It’s called The Breakout Principle: How to Activate the Natural Trigger That Maximizes Creativity, Athletic Performance, Productivity and Personal Well-Being. Wouldn’t you like to know the secret to all that?
According to the authors, Herbert Benson and William Proctor, when you get stuck with a problem at work or in life and grapple with it for a while until you aren’t getting anywhere, you can break out of that rut by doing something physically or mentally repetitive. They suggest meditation, walking, scrubbing the toilet—it can be just about anything. The needlepointing business guru supposedly solved a big problem by engrossing himself in a particularly intricate form of embroidery called petit point. Focusing on a repetitive activity pushes the brain’s reset button, allowing you to find new thought patterns for old problems. Your mind evolves and you get smarter through successive cycles of struggle and breakout. The harder the struggle, the greater the enlightenment is likely to be. It’s a “work hard, play hard” philosophy, coming to you from a pair of authors that includes a professor of medicine at Harvard—so it must be true.
Before you rush out to the craft store for needlepoint sup- plies, take it from me that kayaking has all the same breakout benefits while being a lot more fun. I find there’s no better way to get over writer’s block than to go out for a long paddle. The best escape comes in a following sea that’s big enough to make me pay attention but not so big it really scares me—the golden mean between too-easy and too-hard that produces the mental state psychologists call “flow.”
After a few good hours paddling downwind in a moderate swell, the first two things I need to do when I get to shore are 1) pee, and 2) pull out my notebook to write down all the brilliant ideas I just had on the water. Often the two are emergencies of equal urgency. If I start carrying a pee bottle in my cockpit, I will also have to rig a dictaphone to my Pfd. sitting at a computer, though our careers often demand it, is not a great way to be inspired.
I have come to think of my kayak cockpit as “the Oval Office” because it’s where I do my best work. Indoor work can nourish the mind, but it takes water to digest.
This article first appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.
