We run a lot of stories about how to manage the most powerful tool in today’s economy: your brainpower, and that of your team.
Yet I still went a year without a full week off as we launched Blue Sky.
Two days before my vacation started, as I limped toward the finish line, a brainstorming meeting was called.
I didn’t feel like coming up with great new ideas. I felt even less like hearing other people come up with great new ideas. My brain literally could not “go there,” to the future, to the theoretical, to the possible.
Fortunately, I was days from heading West to the national parks of Arizona and Utah. A trip where often, wonderfully, I had no Internet access. Where “blue sky” was the color of the actual sky, and no more. I was away from my desk and mostly disconnected for a full two weeks.
The sky, not surprisingly, did not come crashing down, and a lot of my mental bandwidth was restored.
There’s nothing here we don’t know, but we frequently need to be reminded: When your brainpower feels like it’s run down to zero, there’s no visibly empty bin. You have to get better and better at knowing the signs — or, ideally, preventing them.
We aim to help with content like this, and this, and this. And Entrepreneur magazine has a really good piece on refueling the mental stores:
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“Most of us wouldn’t think twice about taking a breather after an hour of basketball or Zumba, but mental fatigue is another story. The brain is usually seen as an ethereal realm that exists apart from the body and the laws of physiology. Yet gray matter tires well before the body does. Since almost all of us are doing mental work these days, managing cognitive resources is not a nice thing to be able to do; it’s essential.”
Speaking of creative ideas: How about some of these cheeky social-media brand plays on the (albeit rarely, according to Apple) bending iPhone 6 Plus, or as Samsung put it: “Bend to those who are worthy.”
Sort of the opposite of a vacation: a weeklong boot camp for new staff at Salesforce.com, a hot product for customer relationship management that integrated with social media and works across devices. Inc. delves into it here.
Social Media Week, the Online News Association and Code for America kept Chicago hopping this week. Melissa Harris interviewed Rahm Emanuel and Howard Tullman onstage for a Blue Sky-hosted event covered here by Amina Elahi. Tullman caught Melissa’s attention with this notion: Might a “semester abroad” at 1871 for University of Illinois students keep more tech talent in Chicago? And we caught up with Suzanne Fanning, who gave a keynote on word of mouth and social marketing.
James Dyson, meanwhile, called for more engineers. A lot more. “You’ve got to have much better technology than anybody else. And in order to do that, and to produce it quickly, you need to have a lot of engineers. I mean like three times the number you’ve got at the moment,” Dyson told James Janega.
Kate MacArthur interviewed Mark Fields about the CME Group venture fund, Liquidity Ventures 1 LLC, and its mission. Financial cybersecurity, anyone?
We hope to see you at our Oct. 9 event with Rick Bayless. For anyone who aspires to turn a creative idea into a business, it should be an inspiring conversation. The man made an empire out of tortas!
As always, I hope this post helps you catch up on the week. Especially any time you go on vacation — or just disconnect for a few hours.
Enjoy your weekend!