Howdy Reader!

I'm back in my normal chair, in my normal office, staring at my normal wall.

It's a nice wall. Nothing wrong with it. I just know every square inch of it by now...

A week or so back I was on a train coming home from speaking at Macstock. I could've flown (faster, obviously), but we took the train on purpose. New windows, new scenery, a completely different rhythm than this room.

I came home with a notebook full of ideas. That's not a coincidence. And it's exactly what I wanted.

Fun fact: Stanford researchers ran four experiments and found that walking boosted people's creative output by an average of 60 percent compared to sitting. The weird part? In one experiment, folks walked on a treadmill facing a blank wall, and it worked about as well as strolling around outside. The scenery wasn't doing the heavy lifting. The moving was.

Then there's a 2020 study out of NYU and the University of Miami. They GPS-tracked 122 people for three to four months, and on the days folks moved through more varied places, they reported feeling measurably happier. There's even a nerdy name for it. Roaming entropy. Which sounds less like brain science and more like something you'd pick up from eating lettuce at Taco Bell.

The brain scans backed it up. The people who got the biggest lift from variety showed a stronger connection between the hippocampus (novelty and memory) and the striatum (reward). Your brain hands out gold stars for going somewhere new.

So a new city, a stage, a train ride instead of a plane? That's not downtime. That's you letting your brain do its best work.

And you don't need a conference ticket to pull this off. The researchers said it themselves. Small stuff counts. A walk around the block, a different route to the store, an hour at the coffee shop instead of the desk.

This week, mix it up. Take the long way. Work from somewhere new.

Your best idea is probably waiting somewhere you don't normally go.

See ya around the interwebs,

-Jeff

P.S. Ecamm was at Macstock too, running Creator Camp, and watching a room full of people build live on a Mac all day was its own kind of novelty. If you want to change the scenery on your show without leaving your chair, Ecamm Live is what I actually use. Code JEFF15 gets you 15% off​