Where do your best ideas actually come from?

I’ve been thinking about a question for a long time. Not in a forced sort of way, more just to myself, every now and then: How can I ensure that people don’t become dependent on my work? That I really help them to stand on their own two feet, rather than them needing me time and time again?

I’d been mulling over this question for quite some time. I’d ponder it, put it to one side, then come back to it again.

And then, one morning, I woke up and there was a sentence in my head. Just like that. “Master your mind, become the master of your life.” And alongside it, crystal clear, an image of what my website would look like.

I hadn’t given it any thought at the time. I hadn’t mulled it over, made a list or weighed up the options. The sentence and the image were simply there.

And the crazy thing was: it didn’t go away. It was still there the next day. And the day after that, too. It was only then that I really realised what had actually happened. That wasn’t a sentence I’d made up. It was the answer to my question, and it had come to me just when I wasn’t looking for it. That completely changed my business. The whole direction, the website, what I do today.

Of course, the sentence wasn’t perfect straight away. It was the core, the spark. I then refined it, word by word, until it really felt right. That’s why, if you visit my website today, you won’t find it in exactly those words. But the idea behind it stems from that one morning. And everything is still built on it to this day.

That’s how quietly the truly important insights sometimes come.

And when I looked into it, I realised I’m not alone in this. History repeats itself across the centuries, in the lives of people whose names we all know.

There is a story about a curious trick performed by Thomas Edison, one of history’s greatest inventors. It is said that he would sit down in an armchair for a nap, holding a steel ball in each hand, with a metal plate on the floor beneath him. As soon as he dozed off and his hands relaxed, the balls clattered onto the plate and woke him up. And at precisely that moment, between waking and sleeping, he immediately jotted down the ideas that had come to him.

The Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev is said to have struggled for a long time to organise the chemical elements. He did not succeed. Exhausted, he lay down. And in a dream, so the story goes, he saw a table in which all the elements fell exactly into their rightful places. He woke up and wrote it down. That was the periodic table, which hangs in almost every chemistry laboratory today.

August Kekulé was trying to work out the structure of the benzene molecule but had reached a dead end. Until, whilst half asleep, he saw an image before him: a snake biting its own tail – a ring. That is how he himself later recounted it. When he woke up, he knew that the structure was ring-shaped. To this day, a large part of organic chemistry is based on this discovery.

And then there were the musicians. One morning, Paul McCartney woke up with a complete melody in his head. It was so clear and fully formed that at first he couldn’t believe it was really his. For weeks, he asked other musicians if they’d ever heard the song before. They hadn’t. It was ‘Yesterday’, one of the most covered songs of all time.

Michael Jackson described it in much the same way. He said the songs came to him, not from him. They were simply there, ready-made, and he just had to capture them quickly enough before they disappeared again. Sometimes, he said, he would go to the recording equipment in the middle of the night because the music was there, waiting to be captured.

Different people, different times, different places. And yet, always the same pattern.

The idea didn’t come to any of them whilst they were deep in thought. It came afterwards, once their minds had settled.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Our alert, analytical mind is brilliant at sorting things out, examining them or assessing situations. But it can also be very loud. And as long as it’s running, it drowns out the quieter, deeper intuitions. Only when it comes to rest does space open up. Then something can emerge that previously had no room.

Incidentally, scientists have looked into this. In 2021, a Paris-based research team replicated Edison’s trick in the laboratory, waking people from a state of half-sleep at just the right moment. The result: they solved a tricky task significantly more often. This state between wakefulness and sleep even has a name: the hypnagogic phase. So it’s not just a nice story. There’s something to it.

And now here’s the question that really interests me.

If the best ideas come from a place of calm rather than under pressure: how much noise do you actually carry around with you all day? When do you ever give your mind the peace and quiet it needs for a new thought to come to you?

Many people spend their whole day in ‘loud’ mode. Jumping from one task to the next, constantly thinking, planning and worrying. And then they wonder why no fresh ideas come to mind or why life somehow doesn’t feel quite right.

You don’t need a steel ball to do this. Nor do you need a single method that’s supposed to work for everyone. There are many ways to calm your mind. The key is to find the one that works for you and to make time for it regularly. That’s exactly where I’ll be there to support you.