Why "Doing Nothing" is actually the secret to success
Video Transcript
You've been told there's only one way to make progress. Do more. Move faster, push harder, grind until something happens. Hustle until your face falls off.
But that's only half true. Years ago, my therapist asked me a question that totally floored me and changed how I approach almost everything in my life since then. In this video, I want to give you the other half. >> [music] >> In 1987, an Apple engineer named Steve Sakoman started a secret project called Newton, a handheld computer with handwriting recognition.
It shipped in 1993 and failed pretty dramatically. The battery didn't last. The processor was slow. There was no wireless internet to actually make it useful for users.
And marketing and PR teams had written checks that the Newton just couldn't cash. And then in 1998, Steve Jobs returned to Apple and killed Newton completely. Most people stop the story there, but there's something interesting in this cautionary tale that I want us to talk about. Sakoman left Apple.
He didn't come back to fix the Newton. He came back in 2003 and became one of the earliest people inside the company pushing Apple to build its own phone. Four years later, in 2007, Apple launched the [music] iPhone. >> What we're going to do is get rid of all these buttons and just make a giant screen.
A giant screen. >> Same engineer, same instinct, [music] just 16 years between the project that he started and the product it actually became. Sakoman didn't spend those 16 years trying to patch Newton. He walked away from the whole category until the pieces that would make it work actually existed.
Batteries that lasted a full day, touch screens that responded properly, a cellular network fast enough to carry real data. Sakoman and Apple didn't force it. They waited until the gap closed between their plan and the things required to make their plan real. >> [music] >> Now, let's rewind back to my early 30s.
I was in full-on brute force work mode energy. Work harder, push more aggressively, grind until the work world bends to what I want, and hustle, hustle hustle. And it worked to a point. I built things, and I wrote books, and I sold businesses, and I had some success with that mindset.
But then I started going to therapy. And in one of my early sessions, my therapist noticed how totally intensely I was chasing every goal, every plan, every thought all the time. And then he said something that I instantly knew was important. He said, "Nick, have you ever considered that waiting is an action?" And I hadn't.
Waiting to me had always been the opposite of doing something, a stop, a roadblock, a frustration. But this reframe, it flipped something in me. I realized after considering this point that there is only so much one person can brute force into existence. At some point, you have to take a breath and let the plan you've already set in motion actually play out.
Take a second now and think about the thing you're grinding on. The job you're waiting to leave or the promotion you might be waiting to get, the side project you keep tweaking week after week after week, or the relationship where you keep pushing for a different outcome. Somewhere in there is a version of you doing exactly what I was doing in my 20s. Mistaking constant motion for real progress because stopping, it felt like losing to me.
And that's the moment this video is actually for, the perspective that you might need to shift. >> [music] >> There's real psychological process behind this, too. In 1926, a psychologist named Graham Wallace mapped out how creative thinking actually works, and he [music] laid out four stages: preparation incubation illumination and verification. And incubation is the part that most people skip, but the one that I want to focus on right now.
It's the stage where you stop consciously grinding on a problem, and you let your mind keep working on it in the background. Wallace was clear about this, too. Incubation isn't doing nothing. It's active.
It just doesn't look like it from the outside. And here's the tricky part that I struggle with. If you never pause, if you never wait, if you never stop tweaking and iterating and adding and building, then you never allow yourself to incubate, to consolidate, and to observe your actions unfolding. You're just moving and stacking actions that look like progress.
But sometimes progress means doing nothing. Sometimes progress means letting the world change and move around you and your plan. Sometimes progress means patience. Here's what you've actually been told for most of your life.
Whether anyone said it out loud or not, they say that doing is the only real form of action that leads to any kind [music] of success. Hustle culture promotes this. Social media rewards whoever posts the most. You build everything.
You grow everything. You do everything all the time. But that's only half true. Doing gets you part of the way to success.
The other part, I believe now, is thinking clearly, building a real plan, and having the discipline to let that plan play out, instead of constantly changing the variables with new action. If you're always moving, always doing something new, you're never actually testing the plan that you started with. You're just making it impossible to find out if the plan you had was ever going to work. To be clear, waiting isn't a guarantee.
Sakoman's bet on the iPhone could have failed just as easily as the Newton did. Incubating a plan might show you its flaws instead of reinforcing its successes to you. Waiting doesn't promise the plan works. It just gives the plan an actual chance to be tested properly.
Doing is one part, but waiting is the other. With hindsight, it's easy to analyze anything. To see the obvious link between the Newton and the iPhone, to take a success or failure and look back on the actions that led you to one or the other. But right now, in this moment, I want you to think about a very specific plan you have and ask yourself if you have ever considered waiting as your next action to making that plan work.