The Real Work Happens When You're Moving

I spent years solving problems at my desk. Then I started solving them on a walk.

The desk is where I type things up. The thinking happens somewhere else.

That took me a long time to see. And it cost me more than I would have chosen to pay.

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After my second heart attack, all I could do was walk.

Just a slow loop around the same block, the same houses, the same square of sidewalk I’d probably passed a thousand times without really seeing. My body couldn’t manage much else. There was no agenda because I didn’t have the capacity for one. No performance left to give, nothing to measure, nowhere I was supposed to be producing something. I was just a man doing the smallest possible version of movement and calling it recovery.

For most of my life I had treated my body like a machine built to produce. Recovery forced me to treat it like something I had been given to steward. That’s a different thing entirely, and I’m not sure I would have learned it any other way.

And somewhere in those early loops, without trying to, I started noticing something.

I was thinking more clearly out there than I ever did at my desk.

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For most of my career, I believed the hardest worker in the room was the one who won.

I built my whole professional life on it. Whenever something wasn’t working, I already knew the answer before I finished asking the question. More time, more tea, another app that promised to finally organize the chaos. Push harder. Stay later. That was the whole strategy, and for a long time I was proud of it. It felt like character.

I paid for it. I burned out and went back to it, and by 45 I had two heart attacks to show for the whole thing.

The desk was where serious people did serious things. Walking was what you did when the real work was finished. I had never once questioned that.

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Problems I’d been chewing on for days at my screen would come loose halfway around the block. It wasn’t because I was working harder out there. It was the opposite. They came loose because I had finally stopped.

I sat with that for a while before I went looking for whether anyone else had noticed it. Turns out the researchers at Stanford had put numbers to it. They found that walking increased people’s creative output by an average of 60 percent. I wasn’t a more creative person at my desk. I was just sitting in the wrong place to think.

When I went looking for more, I kept finding the same thing across different centuries. Aristotle walked while he taught. Kierkegaard thought through his ideas on foot. Beethoven walked when he was stuck. Jobs did the same. I had assumed this was something modern productivity culture had recently figured out. It wasn’t. It was something people had always known and I had somehow managed to miss.

I’m not a brain scientist, so I’ll say this the way I actually understand it. When you’re locked in, focused, executing, your mind is running one way. Useful, but limited. There’s a whole other mode that switches on when you let go. When you’re in the shower, or driving a familiar road, or walking without a destination. That’s where the connections form. You stop pushing and something arrives.

Walking is one of the most reliable ways I’ve found to get there. And the thing that wrecked it most was bringing everything with me. The phone. The podcast. The call I need to return. I was still feeding input into a mind that didn’t need more input. It needed space.

There’s a verse that sits with me whenever I think about this. Paul wrote, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.” I do the part that’s mine. I move my body. I carry the question. But the growth comes from somewhere past my own effort. And I have come to believe that receiving what you cannot manufacture is a different kind of work than anything I built on the grind.

That’s not a passive idea. Creating the conditions and then getting out of the way is its own kind of work. Maybe the harder kind.

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I walk before the hard work now, not after I’ve already hit the wall.

For years I only walked when I was fried, treating it like damage control at the end of a depleted day. Now I put it at the front edge, when my head is still clear, because the walk is where the thinking gets done and the desk is just where I write it up. I keep it around twenty minutes. Long enough for my mind to change gears. Short enough that I can’t honestly tell myself I don’t have the time.

On the days when I have something I’m really trying to work through, I leave the phone behind. The first few minutes feel uncomfortable. My hand reaches for a pocket that’s empty. Some part of me insists I’m wasting time. But if I push through those first few minutes, the noise starts to settle, the way a snow globe settles when you finally stop shaking it.

Before I step out, I write down one question. Just one. Some days it’s practical. Some days it’s the harder, quieter kind I’ve been carrying around without naming. The harder question is usually the one that delivers. I’ll start a walk with a knot in my chest and finish with a clarity I didn’t earn so much as receive.

The moment I sit back down, before I open anything, I create a voice note from whatever surfaced. Messy is fine. Half a thought is fine.

I also stopped caring about the steps. I used to only track the number and let it set the tone for my whole day. Now, in addition to tracking, I pay attention to something different. How many things did I actually work out on my feet this week. The step count is a side effect. The decisions made are the output.

One of my boys asked me not long ago why I go for a walk every single day. I told him it’s where I do my best thinking. He looked at me like that didn’t make any sense. I understood it. It didn’t make sense to me either for most of my life.

He doesn’t understand it yet. But one day he will. And if I’ve done my job right, he won’t have to nearly die to learn it the way his dad did.

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Insight doesn’t come from pushing harder. It comes from designing the conditions for it to arrive, and then getting out of the way.