Don't Run From What You Don't Want, Run Toward What You Do
On intuition, open mode, and creating the inner conditions where originality can finally breathe.
During my flight back from Miami, I was reading Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara when one sentence stuck with me:
“Don’t run away from what you don’t want; run toward what you do.”
It hit a nerve. Most of my twenties were defined by running away,
from unprocessed trauma, from my home environment, from Austria, and from the version of myself I didn’t yet understand.
I wasn’t running toward anything because I genuinely didn’t know what I wanted.
But something kept pulling me outward. A quiet pull to explore, to trust decisions that made no rational sense but felt right in my bones.
Over the years, this became a practice: listening to subtle signals, surrendering control, letting life lead, learning the choreography between intuition and uncertainty.
Learning how to dance and play.
That same pull led me to my co-founder, Justin, and to two weeks in Miami for our startup kick-off bootcamp, where we ended up creating a space that felt like what I imagine working at Pixar must feel like: a creative space that felt childlike but intentional, structured enough to hold us yet loose enough to let us wander.
A space where ideas didn’t arrive on command; they emerged naturally because the environment invited them.
A space of connection, imagination, and integration. A space where personal growth is a shared and playful journey.
At the time, it felt strangely normal. Only afterwards did I realize we had unknowingly recreated the exact conditions John Cleese describes as the foundation for creativity.
We didn’t design it that way. It just happened. And it became the most creatively alive period I’ve experienced in years, perhaps ever.
When I was sitting at the Zurich airport waiting for my connecting flight to Vienna, sipping an absurdly expensive espresso, I realized something I had never felt so clearly: for the first time in my life, I knew what I wanted to run toward, to keep creating that Pixar-like container, for us and for as many people as possible.
So, how can we continue to create a Pixar-like container where connection, imagination, and personal growth are a shared journey?
2. John Cleese’s Central Idea: Creativity Is a Way of Operating
Probably the best video I have ever seen on creativity is by John Cleese , and when I reflected on our Pixar-like container, I realised how precisely he articulated something I had just lived through without realizing it.
Cleese makes a simple but almost uncomfortable distinction. Most of us spend our lives in closed mode; the mode of efficiency, decisiveness, problem-solving, the mode that gets things done.
It’s the mode our world rewards. And there’s nothing wrong with it… except that it slowly strangles our imagination if it’s the only mode we know.
Then there’s open mode: loose, playful, unstructured, unpredictable.
It’s not productive in the conventional sense.
It’s not efficient.
It’s not linear.
And that’s exactly why it works.
Cleese’s point is blunt: creativity is not a talent; it’s a way of operating. It is a way of being, but most of us have forgotten how to operate creatively.
A temporary shift in consciousness where the rules loosen, possibility expands, and you stop censoring yourself long enough for something real to surface.
And yet, almost everything about modern life pushes us away from open mode. We’re expected to be rational, quick, decisive, and correct.
There’s no spaciousness for wandering or wondering or letting an idea breathe for longer than five seconds.
And the real magic comes from the dance between the two: to consciously create spaces for open mode, and then, when the moment is right, to close the space and drop back into closed mode, where decisions are made, and ideas get shaped into something real.
Most of us have mastered closed mode. But we’ve almost completely forgotten how to enter open mode at all.
3. The Five Ingredients of Open Mode
John Cleese speaks of certain conditions which do make it more likely that you’ll get into the open mode and that something creative will occur. More likely… you can’t guarantee anything will occur, but you can increase the chance of getting yourself into the open mode.
1. Space
The first ingredient is deceptively simple: you need space. You need an oasis of quiet.
You cannot be playful, and therefore creative, when you’re surrounded by your usual pressures and external demands.
Those pressures automatically push you back into closed mode. So, Cleese insists on creating a sealed-off environment, even if only temporarily.
A quiet space.
A protected space.
A space where you will not be disturbed.
Without stepping out of everyday demands, the mind never loosens enough to wander.
Space signals to your nervous system: You are allowed to drift now.
2. Time (the boundary of the session)
Space alone isn’t enough. You also need time, and Cleese is adamant about this.
Not vague time. Not “I’ll think about it later” time.
But a clear, bounded window where open mode begins and ends. And it doesn’t need to be the whole day, or a whole morning. 90 minutes of interrupted time is enough to get you into the open mode.
This is where Cleese brings in Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, who studied the nature of play.
Huizinga wrote that play is defined by its distinct separation from ordinary life, both in physical space and in duration. It is also called the Magic Circle, where play begins, and then, at a specific moment, it ends. Without boundaries, it ceases to be play.
The same is true for creativity.
A defined oasis, “From now until 3:30, I am sealed off”, tells the mind that it can safely leave closed mode behind.
Boundaries create psychological permission.
3. Time (the willingness to sit with discomfort)
Then comes the second kind of time: the willingness to stay with a problem longer than is comfortable.
Cleese describes watching a Monty Python colleague jump to the first decent solution because it felt relieving to “have it done.”
Meanwhile, Cleese would sit with the same problem an hour longer, tolerating the discomfort of not knowing, and that extra hour almost always produced something more original.
The research backs him up: psychologist Donald MacKinnon found that the most creative professionals were the ones who lingered. They didn’t rush the answer. They tolerated the internal agitation of incompleteness.
This is a crucial, often forgotten truth: originality lives on the far side of discomfort.
If you reach for closure too quickly, you close the door on the breakthrough.
4. Confidence
The fourth ingredient is confidence, but not the loud, performative kind.
It’s the quiet confidence that, in open mode, nothing you do is wrong.
It is the confidence that can and should explore any pathway.
Creativity requires the freedom to explore without self-censorship. To say things that are silly, illogical, naïve, or flat-out ridiculous. To follow impulses that make no sense yet.
To trust that even the nonsense might lead somewhere meaningful.
Alan Watts has a perfect line for this:
“You can’t be spontaneous within reason.”
If you’re afraid of making a mistake, you cannot play.
If you cannot play, you cannot create.
Confidence is the permission slip.
5. Humor
And finally, humor, which is Cleese’s secret unlocking mechanism.
He believes humor moves us from closed mode to open mode faster than anything else.
Humor relaxes the nervous system.
Humor punctures rigidity.
Humor lets the mind breathe.
And yet, many of the environments that most desperately need creative thinking treat humor as inappropriate, as if seriousness and solemnity were the same thing.
They’re not.
We can discuss profoundly serious topics and still laugh. Humor doesn’t cheapen seriousness.
It only threatens the ego.
So when you set up a space/time oasis, giggle all you want.
4. Why It Worked, And How We Can Carry It Forward
When I look back at those two weeks, what astonishes me most is that we weren’t trying to build a perfect creative laboratory. There was no framework, no checklist, no attempt to optimise anything. And yet, somehow, we stepped into one of the purest expressions of open mode I’ve ever experienced.
It was a co-created experience that allowed for space, time, time, confidence and humor.
Nothing is wrong here. Everything can be explored.
That single unspoken permission changed everything.
It is almost like jamming music: it is about listening to others and exploring new pathways. Doesn’t matter how silly or not silly.
“Can we create our own radio station?” or “How much does it cost to launch our own satellite?”
These were just two of many questions we explored.
Is it realistic that we will ever launch our own satellite? Not really, but we gave each other permission to go along and see where it takes us.
Once openness becomes the baseline, imagination starts leading the way.
And because we didn’t stay only in the open mode, because we also knew when to shift back into the clarity and decisiveness of closed mode, ideas didn’t just float.
They formed, they sharpened, and with each shift between the two modes, they gathered momentum.
This rhythm between open and closed, between wandering and deciding, between drifting and building, became the quiet architecture of the entire experience.
And it taught me something I didn’t expect: you don’t need a special place or perfect circumstances to enter open mode.
All you need is child-like curiosity.
A bit of space.
A window of uninterrupted time.
The willingness to linger in discomfort.
The confidence to be silly and wrong.
And humor, always humor, as the oxygen that keeps the whole ecosystem alive.
Most of us have mastered closed mode because the world demands it.
But open mode, the place where originality actually lives, rarely appears unless we create the conditions for it deliberately.
This, to me, is the Unreasonable Art of Living:
Choosing, again and again, to carve out pockets in our lives where nothing is wrong, everything is play, and imagination is allowed to breathe long enough to reveal something true.
Thanks for reading!
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AI has been used to refine structure, grammar, and flow, but every idea, sentence, and story originates from human experience and intuition.