Why your best ideas come after you get away

Go somewhere new. Then put the phone down. The research on creative breakthroughs says you need both, in that order.

26,000 careers, one pattern

In 2021, Dashun Wang and his team at Northwestern University studied the work of about 2,000 artists, 4,000 film directors and 20,000 scientists. They were looking for what comes right before a “hot streak,” the stretch when someone does the best work of their life.

The answer was a sequence. First a period of exploring: trying different styles, subjects and ideas. Then, right after it, a period of focus: going deep on one thing. Exploring alone didn't lead to a hot streak. Neither did focus alone. It was the two together. Van Gogh is the example the researchers start with. His work was all over the place until 1888, when he settled in Arles and painted the pictures he's known for.

Explore, then focus

A good getaway gives you both halves.

• Explore. A new place, new trails, new food, new people around the fire. Your brain has to take in things it hasn't seen before.
• Focus. Quiet, no feeds, no notifications. Time to think one thought all the way through, on a porch or a long walk.

Most trips only do the first half. You see somewhere new, then spend the evenings scrolling. The second half only happens when the phone goes away.

More research that points the same way

In a study from the Universities of Utah and Kansas, people four days into a hike, with no phones or devices, scored about 50% higher on a creativity test than people who hadn't left yet.

Adam Galinsky and his colleagues studied the creative directors of top fashion houses and found that those who had worked abroad produced more creative collections. Time spent deep in another place mattered more than how many places they'd been.

Some people who got away

• Steve Jobs spent months in India in 1974, a couple of years before starting Apple, and talked for the rest of his life about what it taught him about intuition.
• Phil Knight took a trip around the world in 1962. In Japan he met the makers of Onitsuka Tiger shoes, which became the start of Nike.
• The Beatles spent weeks at a retreat in Rishikesh, India, in 1968, without the usual noise around them, and wrote much of the White Album there.
• Van Gogh left Paris for Arles in the south of France, and painted the sunflowers, the yellow house and his bedroom there.

How to plan a getaway that does both

• Pick somewhere you've never been, far enough that it feels different.
• Stay at least two nights. The first day is mostly arriving.
• Spend the first day exploring: walk the town, take a trail, talk to people.
• Spend the second day still: phone in a drawer, a notebook, a chair by the fire or the creek.
• Bring one question you've been stuck on. Don't force it. Write down whatever shows up.

That's what we look for in every stay: somewhere new to explore, and somewhere quiet to come back to. Find one in our guides, and read why we ask for two nights.

Sources: Northwestern University on the hot streaks study (Liu, Dehmamy, Chown, Giles and Wang, Nature Communications, 2021); “Fashion with a Foreign Flair” (Godart, Maddux, Shipilov and Galinsky, Academy of Management Journal, 2015).