Apple founder Steve Jobs had many problems to solve. His approach to this is now supported by science and recommended to everyone.
Steve Jobs ran away from problems? Yes, he went for a walk. The way he dealt with stubborn questions that he couldn’t solve quickly was to not dwell on them forever. Instead, he went for a walk alone or with a friend, as his biographer Walter Isaacson described in his biography published in 2011.
Jonathan Ivy, a long-time companion of Jobs at Apple, also confirmed this to the WSJ Magazine. Ivy was chief designer at Apple for a long time before leaving the company in 2019.
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Variety relaxes the brain
How does a walk help solve problems? According to what the neuroscientist Mithu Storoni explains in his book Hyper: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work or in the English-language podcast on hbr.org, Steve Jobs instinctively did the right thing here.
Walking not only has positive physical effects on your body, but also relaxes the brain as it stimulates new thoughts through disordered external stimuli. Science calls this divergent thinking. You simply break out of the cognitive rut that the problem is part of and think about it in a new way.
The fact that your circulation gets going, that you breathe in fresher air than inside and that the sun literally shines on your mind, at least during the day, is a helpful side aspect.
So should I just walk around getting ideas? No, that would be excessive and also impractical. But it helps to stick to a general rule:
If you think about something for 10 minutes but don’t make any progress, just go around in circles and can’t find a solution, get up. Take a relaxed walk alone or with someone who is good for you, on the street or, ideally, in a park or garden. Have a chat or just let your thoughts wander. The duration may vary, but it should feel like a change, not just a rushed 5-minute walk.
Steve Jobs is not only known for solving problems in an unconventional way, but also for having a good feel for tomorrow’s issues. He spoke at a conference about the first approaches to using artificial intelligence and how it could change or threaten the world: Steve Jobs’ visionary speech about artificial intelligence 40 years ago – The co-founder of Apple anticipated our problems