How to get high quality insights multiple times a day

June, 2021

How can you get the insights you’ve had once a year every year, every day?

Josh Waitzkin has a concept called “the most important question” that can give you the insights multiple times a day that you otherwise would have once every few months. It works by tapping into your unconscious mind. You give it something to work on overnight, then extract the insights in the morning.

By working on this process every day, even multiple times a day, it’s possible to get more and better insights than you have ever had.

Who’s Josh Waitzkin?

Josh Waitzkin is the author of the Art of Learning. He is a former world chess champion, tai chi push hands champion and jiu jitsu fighter. He’s obsessed with deep, quality work. The most important question is a method he has developed to tap deep into the unconscious mind to extract insights on a regular basis that may only happen once every few months otherwise.

The last three turns

Josh Waitzkin tells the story of how Billy Kid (the great alpine skier) asks people: “what are three the most important turns in the slope?”. People will give you all sorts of answers: “the first three, because you gain speed for the rest of the run”, or “the middle, because there you can loose speed”. But Billy says: “It’s the last three turns that are the most important. Those are the ones that are burning into your brain in the lift back up”.

“It’s the last three turns that are the most important. Those are the ones that are burning into your brain in the lift back up” - Billy Kid

And it doesn’t just apply to sports. Ernest Hemingway used a similar process in writing. He used to end his workday with something left to write, even stopping mid sentence. By doing so, his unconscious mind would work on the story during the night, and leaving him a direction to jump right into the next morning.

Feed you mind

You want to finish your day strong, with high quality, focused work in your area of complexity, working on the most important thing. Then you pose a question to your mind. This question is “The Most Important Question” (MIQ). It is what would be most important question in your work. Something you need an answer to. Something you may be stuck one. Something that will have a big effect if you gained an insight into.

Remember “the last three turns”: we want our mind to internalize high quality, and to work on something important.

Release your mind

After you pose the question, it’s important to release your mind from the task, so your unconscious mind can take over. If you are constantly thinking about it, you’ll probably experience stress, as the problem does not leave your mind. And a stressed mind is not creative, does not see solutions and does not think long term.

What we know from sports, is that you need a recovery period to absorb the training - the stress you are putting on your body. An athlete that only trains and never takes recovery seriously is an athlete that will have lots of injuries and can be semi-good, but never great.

So imagine a scale from 1-10 in intensity, we want to work at the “intense ten” instead of at a “simmering six”. It’s better to have one hour of really intense, high quality focused work, than four hours of semi-good work. The former will give you insights that the latter will not. It’s akin to intervall training: a high intensity intervall will give you different effects than two hour slow running.

But to be able to reach the 10, you have to be able to turn to 0. One of the great Jiu Jitsu fighters in the world, Marcello Garcia, was sleeping 5 minutes before the world champions ship. But when he got in the ring, he was more intense than anybody else.

Our body is very well adapted to handle acute stress, not so much chronic stress. Chronic stress leads to all sorts of problems. Acute stress makes your body stronger (up to a certain point). Our mind works the same way. A mind that never shuts off will never reach the highest tops.

The importance of catching air

By focusing on the big stuff at least once pr day will have the effect of coming up from a dive and catching air. You won’t just be heads down working and grinding. You will be able to course correct in real time, and catch problems before they become problems.

Your clarity of mind will be better. It won’t go into overdrive all the time.

People keep their head down and work work work. They don’t surface enough. To ask the question: «is this the most potent direction?» So what you do is ask yourself: what is the most important direction? - Josh Waizkin

Limit distractions from quality work

When you release your mind, don’t open email or social media right away. Rather take some empty-time. Go for a walk, go for a workout, meditate or have a glass of wine. Let the last thing you worked on glide back to the unconscious mind.

The same thing applies when you are coming back to the work. In the morning when you are journaling on the most important question you posed the day before, do it pre-input. Before you open email. Before you read the news. Before you open social media. You want to open the channel into the unconscious, and that has to happen before you do anything else.

Extract the insights

After you have released your mind and had a good night sleep, the first thing to do the next morning is applying your mind to the question. Pre-input, you journal on it. It doesn’t have to be a big brain storm, but to tap into what you’ve been working on unconsciously overnight.

This can be hard to do in the beginning. A great way to practically do it is by freewriting in a journal or a note-app. Freewriting, very shortly explained, is to write so fast that you do the writing on paper, not in your head first. Set a timer for 5 minutes and write as fast as you possibly can. You write whatever pops into your mind (or your pen), don’t edit, just let it flow. Then after 5 minutes you can read over and extract any insights that may have occurred. To dive deeper into freewriting, read Accidental Genius by Mark Levy.

TL;DR - The method

To put everything together, here’s the how-to version of “the most important question”.

End the workday with high quality focus, on a certain area of complexity where you can use an insight
Then you release your mind from it.
The wake first thing in the morning, pre-input. Apply your mind to it. Journal on on it. It doesn’t have to be a big brain storm, but to tap into what you’ve been working on unconsciously overnight.

How to get multiple insights pr day

The big effect of this method happens over night. But you can work to have micro insights throughout the day. You can do this by replicating the method several times a day:

Before you go to the bathroom
Before you go to lunch
Before anything

Before a break in your work, you pose a question, then you release your mind. Don’t actively think about it. Then when you return to it after and do a creative burst.

Get better over time

This method is useful in itself, but you can supercharge the effect by doing a MIQ-gap analysis. A gap analysis is where you look back, maybe a month or a year or more, and evaluate.

Look at the gap between what you thought were important and what was actually important now that you have 20/20 hindsight. Then meditate on how you can bride the gap and how to clear your thinking.

Resources

There are some great resources related to this concept, here’s a few: