I surround myself with beauty. I love fresh flowers. I don’t like messiness around me. I’m like Steve Jobs at NeXT. If you read his amazing biography by Isaacson, you will learn that when he was at NeXT, after he got thrown out of Apple, everything was white because he understood that messiness creates distraction and consumes your bandwidth. So, when I’m in creative mode every day, you might know my Five Great Hours concept, all you need is five world-class hours in monomaniacal focus and performance to call it a world-class day as an epic performer. But when I’m in those five great hours, I work in Tight Bubbles of Total Focus that have nothing around. Often, they’re white spaces, oak floors, lots of light, no posters, no distractions, definitely no phones going off and music in the background, because we know from the science, it’s called attention residue.
Every little distraction, whether it’s a sandwich on a counter, whether it’s a phone going off, whether it’s a poster on the wall, you’re going to leave some of your attention, your focus on that distraction, which means you have less available to bring the full bandwidth of your attention on the project that will allow you to do genius-level work. So, I love beauty. I love minimalism. I love nature. I love great food. I love great simple restaurants where people are loving and they smile and they love food and they love hospitality. And that’s why I love being in Europe so much for example. The Italians are just so dear to my heart. I love sunsets. I love great literature. I love solitude. Beauty might cost and it might not cost anything. You get on your mountain bike or you go skiing or you go running in the woods trail running, or you do yoga on a hike, or you head out into the desert and watch the sunset. Life is just too short not to be around beauty, and that includes people who see the beauty in you.