Your Brain’s Hidden Superpower: Wandering Your Way to Success
What if the key to unlocking your next big idea isn’t doing more... but doing nothing?
You’ll learn:
- Why your brain’s “default mode network” is a powerful tool for creativity
- How wandering thoughts are not a distraction, but your greatest superpower
- The best places to wander (hint: you already go there daily)
- A 10-minute challenge that could change your career, your business, or your life
Resources
- Subscribe on YouTube:
@davidmbitton
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The day a coworker found me on the floor
A few years ago, a coworker walked into my office in Miami and found me passed out on the floor. I was the CEO. I was working the way a lot of founders work: first one in, last one out, phone in my hand from the moment I woke up. I told myself that was the price of building something. It was not. It was extreme burnout, and that morning was the breaking point. I did not know it yet, but the fix was not going to be more effort. It was going to be less.
Always connected, never thinking
Here is the part that surprised me when I started digging. The average American spends five and a half hours a day on their phone. Five and a half hours. Add the laptop, the TV and the meetings, and most of us go from waking up to falling asleep without a single stretch of time where the brain is not being fed something. We are always connected. And a brain that is always taking things in never gets a chance to put anything together.
My 24-hour digital detox
So I tried something that sounded a little extreme at the time: a 24-hour digital detox. From Friday night to Saturday night, every week, no phone, no laptop, no screens. I have kept that up for more than ten years now, and it is the single best decision I have made for my business and for my head. The first few hours are boring. That is the point. When your brain gets bored, it starts to wander.
Wandering is not a flaw in our brain. It’s a feature.
A couch, a pen and a piece of paper
The idea that changed everything came on one of those Saturdays. I was on the couch with a pen and a piece of paper, doing nothing in particular, and the thought just landed: I was the bottleneck. Everything ran through me. The answer was to delegate and to empower the people around me, and to actually let them own things. At the time there were two of us. As I put it on stage: “That one idea took us from two people to 200 people, in offices around the world.” It did not come from a meeting. It came from a couch.
The science: your Default Mode Network
It turns out there is real science behind this. Neuroscientists call it the Default Mode Network, a set of brain regions that lights up on fMRI scans when you are not focused on anything in particular. That is when your brain connects things it has already collected: the conversation from Tuesday, the problem from last month, the thing you read last year. And thanks to neuroplasticity, the more you give it that time, the better it gets at doing it. Wandering is a skill you can train.
Start in the shower
You do not need a cabin in the woods to start. There is one place everyone already goes, every day, with no phone: the shower. It is probably where you have had some of your best ideas already, and then lost them by the time you found a towel. My fix is embarrassingly simple: a waterproof notepad that sticks to the shower wall. Every idea gets written down before it evaporates.
Three more places you already go
Driving, or sitting on the train or the bus, with the podcast off. Exercising, especially the boring kind: a walk, a run, a swim, anything where your body is busy and your mind is free. And the last few minutes before bed. While you sleep, REM sleep strengthens the synapses between the things you were thinking about, so whatever you wander through at night is still working for you in the morning.
Edison’s ball and Dalí’s spoon
Some of the most creative people in history figured this out long before the fMRI machine. Thomas Edison used to nap in a chair holding a metal ball in his hand. As he drifted off, his hand would relax, the ball would drop and the noise would wake him, right at the moment when his mind was loosest and the ideas were flowing. Salvador Dalí did the same thing with a spoon and a plate. Both of them were catching the drop on purpose.
The 10-minute wandering challenge
So here is my challenge to you. Ten minutes a day. No phone, no music, no podcast, no input at all. Sit, walk, shower, drive in silence, it does not matter which. Give your brain ten minutes with nothing to do and let it wander. Keep a pen nearby. Do it for a week and see what shows up.
Now go off and wander
I stood on that stage because a coworker found me on the floor, and the thing that fixed it was not a productivity app. It was giving my brain the space it was built to use. So, in the words I closed the talk with: now go off, wander, and change the world.
It was a beautiful sunny day in Miami, Florida. But for me, it was a day a coworker found me passed out in my office. As the CEO of my tech startup, I was suffering from extreme burnout. And I finally hit my breaking point. But today, I’m proud to stand before you, fully recovered, a five-time tech entrepreneur, best-selling author, and loving husband and father of three beautiful children. And I’m here to show you how I turned my life around and found my key to success. And it’s all about disconnecting and letting your mind wander.
My biggest challenge was always being connected to my devices. And I was making the classic business mistake of always working in the business instead of on the business. In a recent survey of over a thousand Americans, they found that the average person spends almost five and a half hours on their phones every single day. Most of us think we own our phones, but the truth is our phones own us. Do you ever feel that way? I did. And I knew I had to make a drastic change to survive. And that’s when I discovered that my key to recovery and success wasn’t being more connected. It was being more disconnected.
So, I decided to take a 24-hour digital detox every Friday to Saturday night. And I’ve been doing that for over 10 years now. And that means for 24 hours, no phone, no computer, no work, just relaxing, resetting, and doing nothing. And when I did nothing, something magical happened. My mind started to wander. But I don’t mean aimless wandering. Studies show our minds wander every few minutes already. But what if you could harness those wandering moments and channel them into creative breakthroughs, business strategies, and life-changing ideas? You see, wandering is not a flaw in our
brain. It’s a feature. And I use this feature every time I needed to solve a major problem in life. I would sit on my couch with a pen and paper. Now I would just disconnect. And after a few minutes, all the solutions came pouring into my head and onto my paper. One day while wandering, I had an epiphany that changed my career. I always thought that as the CEO, I needed to be the most important person in the company and hold all the power and make all the decisions. But I realized in order for my company to grow, I needed to delegate and empower others. And that one simple change helped grow my companies from a two-person startup
into a 200-person global company today. I didn’t know it at the time, but scientifically, when your brain wanders, it activates the default mode network, or the DMN, that is responsible for our internal thought processes that leads to creative insights and problem solving. In this functional MRI scan, you could see the parts of the brain in the front and back that light up when the DMN is engaged. And the best part is, through neuroplasticity, the more we use it and train it, the stronger it gets and the faster and easier it can be to generate those creative insights. People ask me, “So, David, how can I be a wanderer like you if I can’t spare 24
hours?” I discovered the perfect time and place every day for disconnecting. And actually, all of you already go there once a day. In fact, some of you even go there twice a day. Can you guess where it is? Shower. The shower. Yeah, the shower is the only time and place I found where there are no distractions and it’s where I get my best thinking done. My problem was I would step out of the shower and forget all of my ideas. So, believe it or not, they actually make a waterproof shower notepad and you could see it here in my shower. But buyer beware, for those that have children (I have three), they think the
notepad is for them. And I’m happily married for over 11 years now. And sometimes I use a notepad to leave notes for my wife. And sometimes she replies back. Besides the shower, I found three other times perfect for disconnecting. Number one: when driving or on the bus or train. Put your phone away. Turn off your music or podcast. Disconnect and let your mind wander. Number two: when you’re exercising, working out, playing sports, going for a run, turn off your music and let your mind wander. And number three, and most important, all of you already know we’re supposed
to put our phones away before bed. But what you might not know is if you think of your biggest problem or challenge before going to sleep, when you enter REM sleep, your brain is actually almost as active as if you’re awake and it’s strengthening the synapses for increased problem-solving abilities. Everyone knows Thomas Edison, famous inventor, thinker, and creator of one of the world’s first commercial light bulbs. Anytime he wanted to have his light bulb moment, he would hold a metal ball in his hands just like this and he would take a nap. And as he was drifting off, the ball would drop
and he’d wake up with that creative breakthrough. Famous artist Salvador Dalí did the exact same thing with a metal spoon. Now, I know what you’re all thinking. What else do I have in my pockets? And I definitely know what my wife is thinking. That’s where all my spoons are. I want to leave you today with a 10-minute wandering challenge. Anytime you have 10 minutes free, disconnect, put your phone away, be present, and let your mind wander. And just to make sure you all got it, I want to ask for your help as loud as you can. I want to hear you later today when you’re free. What are you gonna do? All right, my wanderers. Now go off,
wander, and change the world. Thank you.
