In 1995, Bill Gates disappeared into a cedar cabin in the Pacific Northwest for a week — no meetings, no family, no distractions. What emerged from that silence was a memo called "The Internet Tidal Wave" that repositioned Microsoft for the internet age. He called it Think Week. And it changed everything.

Most of us can't take a week off-grid. But the principle behind what Gates did is available to every leader, every single day. In this episode, Todd explores why knowing what's on your mind is one of the most underleveraged skills in leadership — and what you're missing when you never slow down long enough to find out.

In This Episode

Three things that only surface when you make time to be alone with your thoughts:

1. Patterns you're missing. In the noise of daily operations, patterns accumulate quietly — in your team, your work, your own behavior. You can't connect the dots when you're always running.

2. Tensions you're carrying. Leadership isn't about eliminating tension — it's about identifying and managing it. Unnamed tension leaks into your decisions and relationships. Solitude gives you the chance to finally name it.

3. Your feelings, instincts, and intuition. Your gut is data. But you can only access it when you get quiet enough to listen.

Three Ways to Start This Week

• Morning solitude — 15–20 minutes before your phone, before the news, before anyone else's agenda
• A walk at lunch — no headphones, no podcast, just movement and an open mind
• 25 minutes before bed with a blank notepad and one question: What's actually on my mind?

Quote of the Episode

"The leaders who know themselves best don't just work hard. They also know what's going on inside them. That self-knowledge is a competitive advantage — and it only comes from one place: silence."

Mentioned in This Episode

• Bill Gates' Think Week — a twice-yearly solo retreat Gates began in the 1980s, documented by The Wall Street Journal
• "The Internet Tidal Wave" — Gates' 1995 internal memo, written during a Think Week, that redirected Microsoft's strategy toward the internet

About Herding Tigers

Herding Tigers is the podcast for creative leaders hosted by Todd Henry, author of Herding Tigers, Die Empty, and The Accidental Creative. Each episode delivers practical insights to help you lead well, do your best work, and bring out the best in your team.

Connect with Todd

toddhenry.com | @toddhenry

Foreign.

Welcome to the Herding Tigers podcast.

My name is Todd Henry.

No exaggeration.

Microsoft was absolutely dominant and busy didn't even begin to describe what his life was like.

And yet, twice a year, Bill Gates did something that looked almost irresponsible from the outside.

He disappeared.

He'd fly by helicopter or seaplane to a small cedar cabin tucked away in the Pacific Northwest.

No family, no meetings, no colleagues, nothing.

No contact.

A caretaker left two meals a day at the door.

Apparently, that was his only contact with the outside world.

And for seven days, Bill Gates just read and thought.

He called it Think Week.

He'd been reading papers from Microsoft employees about a technology that most of the business world was still kind of dismissing.

He wrote a memo to his entire executive staff and titled it the Internet Tidal Wave.

In it, he argued that the Internet would soon change everything and that Microsoft needed to move immediately or get left behind.

That memo directly led to the development of Internet Explorer and repositioned the entire company to take advantage of what was about to happen with the Internet, with the World Wide Web.

That insight didn't come from a strategy meeting.

It didn't come from staring harder at a problem.

It didn't come from a consultant's report.

It came from stillness.

And that's what we're going to talk about today.

I want to talk about something that sounds very simple but is increasingly rare.

Knowing what's actually on your mind.

As a leader, we spend so many days in reactive mode.

Someone else's urgency becomes our priority.

We move from meeting to meeting.

We move from screen to screen, problem to problem.

Everything's transactional.

We click a button, people go away.

New people appear.

And in that busyness, we lose touch with our own interior world.

We frankly, we stop noticing things.

We stop feeling things.

At least consciously.

The leaders that I've seen struggle the most.

The ones I work with who struggle the most aren't struggling because they lack intelligence or because they lack effort or they don't have talent.

Of course they have talent, or they wouldn't even get to where they are.

Talent gets you in the game, but it's your practices that keep you at the table.

These leaders are struggling because they've lost access to something far more important themselves.

Their own intuition, their own thought process.

They don't know what they're thinking until someone forces them to say it out loud.

And by then, it's often too late to act on it.

So listen, Bill Gates could afford a couple weeks a year.

Most of us can't do that.

But here's one thing.

The principle of what Bill Gates did is available to every single one of us every single day.

So I want to walk you through three specific ways that can help us become more aware of our thoughts, to spend more time alone with our thoughts, to understand what's on our mind.

Three practices.

Three things that you might need to identify that you simply cannot access.

When you're always busy, when you're always distracted.

So here are the three overlooked hidden currents that are running through your mind that you're often unaware of.

Number one, the patterns that you're missing.

Patterns don't announce themselves.

They accumulate quietly in the background, in your work, in your team dynamics and your own behavior.

The client conversation that keeps going sideways, but you haven't really ever thought about it.

You haven't really noticed the pattern.

The meeting where nobody speaks up.

The week where you consistently avoid one particular task, that you just keep kicking it down the curb.

These patterns are telling you something, but you have to be still long enough to recognize what they're telling you.

Bill Gates saw a pattern.

He saw the rising tide of Internet adoption.

The noise of day to day operations obscured it, but he saw it because he paused long enough to pay attention to the pattern.

Solitude let him connect dots that urgency never would have.

So what are the patterns that you're missing in your own life, in your own work?

The things that keep recurring but you're overlooking them because you're so busy?

Number two, the tensions that you're carrying.

Here's something most leadership development gets wrong.

The goal isn't to eliminate tension.

It's not.

It's to identify tension and to manage it.

Leadership is not about eliminating tension.

Most immature leaders want tension to go away because tension makes them uncomfortable.

But that's not what leadership is.

Good leadership in effective organizations is about managing the inherent tensions of doing creative, problem solving work.

Tension is often a signal that something important is at stake.

Competing values, unresolved conflict.

A decision that you're avoiding, or maybe a big project that you're trying to find the fit for.

Those tensions are natural.

They're endemic in doing great creative work.

But if you never slow down, tension just becomes background noise.

You carry it without naming it.

And unnamed tension tends to leak into your decisions, into your relationships, into your creative work.

Time alone with your thoughts gives you the chance to ask, what's pulling at me right now?

What am I pretending isn't there?

What are the tensions that I need to identify so I can manage them?

So that's the first thing is the patterns you're missing.

The second thing is the tensions that you're carrying.

The third is your own feelings, your own instinct, your own intuition.

Somewhere in the chaos of a full calendar and a full inbox, your instincts got buried.

You felt something about that new hire that you were about to make, or that you did make, but you ignored it.

Your gut said something about the strategy, but you overrode it.

Leaders with the most hard won wisdom I know have learned to treat their own intuition as data.

But you, you can only access that data in quiet.

You can only access that data when you're alone with your thoughts long enough to allow that intuition to surface.

Your feelings aren't distractions from the work.

They're often the most important information you have.

So your own feelings about things, your own instincts, your own intuition, these are important things that we overlook, that we often lose touch with when we're so busy, when we're not alone with our thoughts.

So those are the three things, the patterns you're missing, the tensions you're carrying, and your own feelings, instincts and intuition.

Now, how do you get in touch with these things?

You don't need a cedar cabin and a helicopter.

Here are a couple of ways that you can get alone with your thoughts.

Number one, alone time.

In the morning, before anything starts, sit with your cup of coffee or your smoothie or whatever it is.

Spend 15 or 20 minutes before your day begins with a blank notepad and that's it.

Not your phone, not your iPad, not your laptop.

Just 15 to 20 minutes with a blank notepad.

And just write down whatever crosses your mind.

And it might seem silly.

It might be a random meeting that's coming up.

It might be a random task that you realize you need to do.

Write it down, that's fine, but just write down whatever crosses your mind.

But the goal is to sit there with a blank pad of paper and just record whatever crosses your mind.

Do this before the phone, before the news, before anyone else's agenda enters your head.

Just sit with a blank notepad and notice what comes up.

You will be shocked at how often something pops into your mind that you didn't even know was there.

Or maybe, hey, I wonder why this person said this thing in the meeting yesterday.

I completely forgot that they said that.

And it'll just come to the surface and it's because your mind is surfacing something that you had overlooked.

Okay, so sit with a blank notepad in the morning.

If you can't do that for some reason, take a walk at lunch.

Leave your headphones behind.

Let your mind wander.

Movement and solitude are a powerful combination.

Something about the rhythm of walking seems to loosen thoughts that are stuck.

So maybe just walk with an index card in your back pocket and a pen.

Just walk around for 15, 20 minutes and just let your mind wander.

Just see where your mind goes and write down whatever crosses your mind.

Or at the end of the day, 25 minutes before bed with a blank notepad.

Not a journal prompt, not a to do list, not planning your day for tomorrow.

Just a blank page with the question what's actually on my mind?

Again, you'll be surprised what shows up when you stop filling the silence.

Personally, for me, the best time for this is first thing in the morning because my mind is a blank slate.

I don't.

I'm not carrying the weight of my day.

I also tend to take walks over lunch in the middle of my day because I find it's a nice buffer between the morning and the afternoon.

But listen.

Totally up to you.

Whatever works for you.

But make sure that you're blocking time to be alone with your thoughts.

Do you even know what's on your mind?

Bill Gates once described Think week as CPU time.

Time when his brain isn't executing tasks but actually processing.

Most of us never give our minds that chance.

So start small, but start.

Start today.

Start tomorrow.

Okay?

Hey, I hope this is helpful again.

What we talk about here on the show are just some practical things that can help us be better leaders, be better creative pros, be better human beings, honestly is what we're kind of trying to do here.

So would love to hear your thoughts, your feedback, your comments about this.

Feel free to send them to me.

Emailoddhenry.com is my email address.

You can reach me there or oddhenry.com also check out creative Leader Roundtable.

We currently have a handful of dozen people who are meeting once a month to talk about the pressures of creative leadership.

If you'd like to check it out, just visit creativeleader.net until next time.

May you be brave, focused and brilliant.

We'll see you then.

Sam.