Why Barack Obama travelled 15,687 km to Sanur to write, but I retreat somewhere else
Credit: Jonathan Ernst (Reuters)
For most of the year, I live in Sanur, Denpasar, Eastern Bali, Indonesia. It’s a tranquil town that until recently didn’t have much happening. In fact, some Australians (who love coming here) used to call it “S’nore”, as the word sounds similar to the way you’d pronounce the town name in an Aussie accent.
In early 1993, just months after he’d gotten married to Michelle (and to her mild dismay) Barack Obama travelled to Sanur. He was here to retreat and write his first book (“Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance”). He worked from a beach bungalow within walking distance of my house. For a month or so, he drafted longhand on yellow pads, pacing his porch and the surrounding oceanfront, as anonymous as he’d ever get to be.
I have to give it to Barack. A white sand beach with calm, warm seawater gently lapping against the shore, traditional jukung boats quietly and picturesquely floating around, the majestic Agung volcano dominating the skyline on clear days, and a 5-7km strip perfect for walking, cycling or jogging all make for a dreamy setup to write a book from.
Photo taken in 2021 with my mobile phone.
Yet, when I need to disconnect, think big picture, reflect, I get away from the very idyllic spot Obama flew halfway across the world from Chicago, to find the peace and quiet required to do so. I go to Karangasem in East Bali; to Transylvania, in Romania, not far from where I was born; to Tallinn, Estonia, a desert in Jordan, or the jungles north of Ubud, an hour away from here.
Carl Jung would retreat on the upper lake of Zurich, near the small town of Bollingen, in a tower he modelled after meditation rooms he had seen on a tour of India, to think deeply about his breakthrough work on psychiatry and the collective unconscious.
A farm called Woolstorpe, roughly 100km from Cambridge, is where Issac Newton famously retreated during the bubonic plague pandemic to invent calculus, create the science of motion, unravel gravity & more.
The similarities between Obama, the other illustrious gentlemen mentioned and I don’t stretch much further than this observation, of course. Yet, it made me wonder why.
This seems to be backed by larger data: a survey showed that 77% of professionals report greater productivity while working offsite.
So what is it about our day-to-day stomping grounds that prevents us from being inspired, hyper-focused, creative, and more likely to do “deep work” or have a breakthrough?
After going down a few rabbit holes, I narrowed it down to two main aspects:
Disconnecting is essential for focused work
Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University, New York Times bestselling author and one of my favorite experts in time management and a well-lived life, defines deep work as the ability to focus without distraction on a mentally demanding task. He observed that “the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.”
The problem is that in the world we live in, and the day-to-day realities we’re part of, the ability to ignore distractions and do deep work is hard to come by.
Modern offices tend to be distraction-central; urgent requests make it impossible to focus on your priorities. Chatty colleagues, mobile phone notifications and the view out of the window lead to the average worker wasting as much as 60 hours/month. So much about office work is meta-work, work about work. Meetings, status updates, planning, reports. There’s very little time left for actual work. Time tracking platform RescueTime found that of 50,000 professionals surveyed, most spent merely 38% of their workday on “core” work that helped them make meaningful progress on projects.
We now have more and more research (like this) on the benefits of quiet, disconnected time. Meditation (essentially an ultra-quiet state) has been proven to improve decision-making. People in this study made smarter decisions after just 15 minutes of meditation because it made them more resistant to their own biases.
New environments rewire your brain
Decades ago, we used to believe that the brain could only change during childhood. Neuroscience has proven that our brain is ever-changing through a process called “neuroplasticity.”
A new environment switches off your autopilot and “wakes up” your brain. Going through the same actions and routines every day is useful and saves precious time and energy, but it also “dulls” our creativity. Being in a new, unfamiliar environment fires up our neurons and helps us develop “cognitive flexibility”.
A study assessed the connection between international travel and creativity for designers. The results highlighted that individuals who lived in other countries produced more creative designs.
My team and I have observed this first hand over the last 10 years of running entrepreneurial retreats with Project Getaway and not only. One entrepreneur had a delayed flight on the way in, missed his connection, and ended up with an overall terrible travel experience. Instead of taking over the main sofa at the retreat location and complaining about it for a while, he got to work and founded the world’s largest flight compensation company, which went on to go through Y Combinator and multiple rounds of funding.
If you need to get some thinking done, work on your next big thing without the distractions and obligations of day to day life, kick your creativity in high gear, or give yourself some time and space to make things from your heart, you may want to consider a “getaway” retreat. It may not have to be weeks on end, 15,000+ km away from home, like in Obama’s case.
A few days in a quiet, inspiring environment, one hour away from your regular address might be transformative enough.
Let me know what came of it.
