the famous slow-motion walking scene from Reservoir Dogs
Today I’m revisiting some thoughts from years ago, feeling they are valuable to share once again.
Yesterday’s post, “that seems so obvious…now” contained a FB memory from the same day seven years prior, noting my growing obsession at that time with learning about what drives elite performance in sports and how lessons from that can be taken to leadership in business. This was not new, I had been an athlete for many years and, as I moved into coaching leaders, I spent more and more time seeking to understand elite performance in sports.
Over three and a half years ago I wrote “Slow Motion Multitasking“, riffing on the power of variety in life and work and how things can cross-pollinate, how they can connect the dots. It also references the concept of slow-motion multitasking from Tim Harford, noting how the likes of David Bowie and Michale Crichton focussed on multiple areas tangential to their work to then pull them together into remarkable success. Over a much longer-term, Charles Darwin focussed on areas as diverse as portraiture and the study of earthworms (as well as his theories on evolution) over several decades.
Taking the example of my study of elite performance in sports, I have spent a lot of time in this space since that seven-year-old note, connecting the dots for many learnings applicable to business, truly multi-tasking in slow motion over many years.
In looking back to that older blog, one other thought. In my #WhatComesNextLive conversation a few days ago with Rory Sutherland, towards the end of the wide-ranging chat, he talked about the power of being in nature to help us solve problems we are stuck on. Though I didn’t inject it into the conversation, this reminded me of a story I told in that “slow-motion multitasking” post, about the power of “sleeping on it” of putting down a problem and letting your subconscious mind go to work on it. I learned this at 21 and it has always stayed with me. Here is that extract from that post that I feel to highlight for you as a learning to share:
Finally, to going slowly, and an example I use again and again on the power of the mind in switching between tasks.
When I was 21, I owned a classic sports car that was a little older than me. Put another way, it was a rusty and creaky Triumph Spitfire convertible. One day I picked up a friend at Edinburgh University to drive him to where we both lived outside the city. Coincidentally (hmm) as this memory comes to me, I note that the location was not one hundred yards away from where I took pictures with my son the other day to celebrate his master’s graduation. Anyway, we got in the car and I decided to show off by revving the engine and spinning the wheels as we took off, only as I did this the engine kept revving and the wheels didn’t move. Oops, I’d broken the car. I’d disintegrated the rear-wheel-drive differential. The car was literally undrivable.
Fast forward a few weeks. First, we’d towed the car all the way out to my father’s house in that village outside Edinburgh. Next, I’d gone to multiple salvage yards before finding a replacement rear differential at a budget affordable to me (ie very cheap!). So, here I was, with the car up on jacks, lying underneath it trying to disassemble the very dirty and rusty 22-year-old rear differential before then looking to replace it with the marginally newer (but at least functional) one.
This was a seemingly interminable task of not only trying to loosen bolts held fast, but also doing in a sequence that helped others loosen up in a way that would ultimately free up the entire assembly to be removed. It quickly felt like I’d taken on an impossible task for someone with very little mechanical experience.
Evening after evening I patiently laboured for hours with cleaning fluid, lubricants to loosen bolts, wrenches of all different kinds. It was hugely frustrating, yet one learning gradually emerged. Each evening I would get out from under the car, exhausted and mentally beaten down, wondering what on earth I could do to “unstick” this problem. It always seemed totally unsolvable, however, each new morning I would wake up and suddenly, miraculously it seemed, realise what the next step would be in the puzzle.
Though it ultimately took me about a week to complete the entire task, several times I went to bed feeling I would never find the answer, only to wake the next morning to have total clarity on the next step.
What created that clarity? Changing tasks. Each evening I would have spent all day under the car labouring steadily and slowly, but when I went into the house I’d shower, have dinner with family, chat, watch TV, perhaps go to my room and listen to music and practise with drumsticks and my drumming mat. Most of all, though, I’d sleep, solid as a rock with exhaustion. This then allowed the brain to go to work with a combination of deep and REM sleep, allowing waking up fresh with seemingly miraculous powers to solve the problems that were so intractable the night before!
I’ve always remembered this experience. Did I consciously choose to work on a frustrating motor mechanics issue as “intellectual crop rotation” or “slow-motion multitasking”? I did not.
I have, however, applied what I learned so many times, as well as using the story in coaching clients who have been “stuck” looking to solve a problem. Sometimes we can shift that sense of being stuck in a coaching meeting, and at the same time, I have often used that story as a tool to then ask them what they can do to “shift gears” then come back to their issue later.
Sometimes for clients that have meant going to walk on the beach (for Cayman clients in particular!), sometimes it has been as easy as leaving the phone in the office and going for a thirty-minute walk, slowly, consciously, focus on their body and their surroundings.