1: One summer night in Milwaukee, the San Francisco Giants lost to the Brewers in a brutal late-inning collapse.
Bruce Bochy, the team’s manager, found himself sitting alone in his office, brooding over the loss.
Still restless, he decided to walk back to the team’s hotel.
“It was maybe four miles, and it was late, and the Brewers’ stadium is not exactly pedestrian-friendly,” Rustin Dodd writes in his post in The Athletic, “An MLB manager found value in long walks.”
Upon arriving at the hotel, Bruce felt better.
He “kept up the routine as the Giants made World Series runs in 2010 and 2012, exploring cities and taking in San Francisco’s neighborhoods. . . On the road, he kept a daily routine: An afternoon walk to the ballpark, no music, no podcasts, just his thoughts.”
Bruce is not alone in his enjoyment of walks.
Rustin notes that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was known for holding walking meetings, and Ernest Hemingway took walks around the Seine in Paris to overcome writer’s block.
“And the famed psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky sharpened their biggest ideas while on long, meandering walks: ‘I did the best thinking of my life on leisurely walks with Amos,’ Kahneman wrote in the 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
2: This week, we’ve been exploring some of the ideas around “Mental Wealth” in Sahil Bloom‘s book The 5 Types of Wealth.
“There is one simple, entirely free tool,” Sahil writes, “that we can use to find and embrace more space in your life: The walk.
He observes that philosophers have long relied on walks for mental clarity, creativity, and recovery. Aristotle, for example, founded the Peripatetic school of philosophy—a name derived from his habit of walking while teaching or conversing.
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once wrote, “Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”
Scientific research also supports these effects. Sahil highlights that Stanford researchers found students performed significantly better on creative and divergent thinking tests during and after walking.
“In fact, walking boosted creative thinking by an average of 60 percent, and the benefits lasted well beyond the walk itself.
“Researchers in Illinois,” he notes, “found that children exhibited improved cognitive performance after twenty minutes of walking compared to twenty minutes of sitting quietly.
Similarly, the University of Hong Kong found that walking side by side deepens feelings of connection—suggesting that walking meetings may even foster better outcomes.
3: Drawing on these findings, Sahil encourages us to find ways to add both long and short walks into our daily routine.
Here are some ways to do so:
- “Take a five-minute walk between meetings, after a meal, or before an important presentation.
- “Go for a fifteen-minute walk first thing in the morning. The sunlight, movement, and fresh air have a direct positive impact on your mood, circadian rhythm, metabolism, digestion, and more.
- “Enjoy longer, passive, tech-free walks when you have the time. These walks are thirty to sixty minutes long and are done at a slow, leisurely pace with no technology. The mind should be free to wander. Allow your ideas to mingle. I’d suggest bringing a little pocket notebook to log anything interesting that comes into your head (it will happen!).”
This simple but powerful tool is a “Mental Wealth” game-changer. And best of all, it’s free.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: How might my energy, creativity, and mood shift if I treated daily walks as a core part of my mental wealth—rather than as something “extra” to fit in when I have time?
Action: Schedule at least one intentional walk each day this week—a five-minute reset between meetings, a short morning walk in the sunlight, or a longer tech-free stroll—and use a small notebook to capture any ideas or insights
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