Walking increases creative output by 60%. And the boost doesn't stop when you sit back down. Stanford researchers ran four experiments testing what happens to creative thinking when people walk. They measured it using established creativity tests — tasks where you have to generate novel, useful ideas under time pressure. Here's what they found: 1. 81% of participants produced more creative ideas when walking than sitting. The average increase in creative output was around 60% — and it wasn't just more ideas. A higher proportion of the ideas generated while walking were novel and appropriate. 2. It works on a treadmill facing a blank wall. The creative boost came from the physical act of walking, not the change of scenery. To prove it, they pushed a separate group of participants in wheelchairs through the same outdoor path. Walkers outperformed them. The environment wasn't the driver. Walking was. 3. The effect doesn't stop when you sit down. Participants who walked and then sat were just as creative as those still walking — and far more creative than those who had been sitting the whole time. A short walk before a brainstorm is as effective as walking during one. 4. 100% of outdoor walkers generated at least one novel high-quality analogy, compared with 50% of those who sat indoors. Walking outside produced the most creative output across every measure. 5. Walking helps you brainstorm, not solve equations. It boosted divergent thinking (generating novel ideas) but slightly reduced convergent thinking (finding a single correct answer). The takeaway: walk when you need to think wide, sit when you need to think precise. We sit 9.3 hours a day — more than we sleep. And most of that sitting happens during the hours we're expected to do our most creative work. The next time you're stuck, the answer might not be to think harder. It might be to get up. 📊 Source: Oppezzo & Schwartz, "Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking," Stanford University, Journal of Experimental Psychology (2014)

The sweepstake, done properly. ⚽ Deel Kick Off is a free global prediction competition for everyone on Deel. $150,000 prize pool. Wherever you work, whoever you support - you're in. 👉 app.deel.com/worldchampionsh… T&Cs apply. 18 . Participation may be restricted in certain jurisdictions.

People who procrastinate are 16% more creative than people who start right away. That's from a study by Jihae Shin and Adam Grant, published in the Academy of Management Journal. Participants were asked to generate new business ideas. Some started right away. Others were given five minutes to play Minesweeper first. Independent evaluators rated the procrastinators' ideas as more creative - as long as the task was already in their head before they delayed. We're taught to start fast, move first, and avoid failure. But research on the most original thinkers shows the opposite: 1. Da Vinci spent 16 years of his life on the Mona Lisa. He kept getting sidetracked — studying optics, dissecting human anatomy, experimenting with how light hits curved surfaces. Those detours changed how he painted light, how he blended shadow, how he built depth without a single visible brushstroke. The delay made the Mona Lisa what it is today. Martin Luther King rewrote his biggest speech past 3am the night before the March on Washington. Still scribbling notes as he waited to go onstage. Eleven minutes into the speech, he abandoned his script entirely. "I have a dream", the four words that defined the civil rights movement, were improvised on the spot. 2. The failure rate is 47% for first movers vs 8% for improvisers. Facebook came after Myspace. Google came after Yahoo. Warby Parker launched after other companies were already selling glasses online. They were slow because they were solving the right problem. 3. Firefox and Chrome users stay 15% longer at their jobs. They also outperform IE and Safari users. It's not the browser. IE and Safari come preinstalled. Those users accepted the default. Chrome and Firefox users questioned it and went looking for something better. That instinct carries over into everything. 4. Warby Parker tested 2,000 names before finding the right one. Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart produced hundreds of compositions to get a handful of masterpieces. Elon Musk was sure the first SpaceX launches would fail. He didn't expect Tesla to succeed. But not trying felt worse than failing. The pattern: originals procrastinate, doubt their ideas, and fail constantly. They just refuse to let any of that be the reason they stop. Insights from Adam Grant's TED Talk on the surprising habits of original thinkers.

Creating is becoming easier. Getting people's attention is getting harder. A breakdown of the data: 1. Books. Weekly e-book releases on Amazon have more than doubled since ChatGPT launched - hitting 292K. The barrier to publishing a book is now 0. The barrier to getting someone to read it has never been higher. 2. Lawsuits. 17% of federal filings are now from people representing themselves. AI didn't just make content creation easier. It made professional services feel optional. People are walking into courtrooms armed with an LLM instead of a lawyer. 3. Music. Deezer went from 10% AI-generated uploads to 44% in a year. Spotify purged 75 million AI tracks - that's half their entire catalog. But almost nobody's listening to any of it. AI music makes up less than 3% of actual streams. The supply exploded. The demand barely moved. 4. Science. ArXiv submissions hit 77,621 in a single quarter. More papers don't mean more breakthroughs. It means more noise for actual breakthroughs to cut through. The pattern is the same everywhere: supply is exploding, attention is fixed. The number of readers, listeners, and reviewers have remained the same, but now we have more stuff competing for the same eyeballs. The new scarce resource isn't the ability to create. It's the ability to cut through the noise.

The Class of 2026 mentions AI on their resumes 9x more than 2022 grads. Two-thirds of those mentions aren't from Computer Science students. They're the most AI-fluent workforce cohort ever, and they're being underestimated. Our chief economist, @lcthomas1212, gathered a small group of labor economists from @Glassdoor, @GuildEducation, and @joinHandshake to unpack it over dinner. Check out the full discussion on Deel Works here: deel.com/deel-works/labor-ec…

100% of Deel's ops teams run on @Akai_by_deel. We didn't beta test Akai on customers, we ran it on ourselves first. Now it’s your team’s turn. See it in action at our webinar May 28 → deel.com/events/akai-by-deel…

The best founders don't wait for the world to come to them. The Pitch by Deel (sponsored by @jpmorgan) started as a competition. What it became was something harder to put into words — a community of builders who refused to let geography be a barrier to funding. 689 registrants. 307 who showed up in person. 13 judges. And 5 startups who walked away with up to $1M investment and a network that'll last far longer. ZEELY AI Inc., Smart Bricks, nybl, Acceler8, Alpic — these are the global winners. But every founder who stepped on stage this season won something. This is what happens when you bring the world's best seed-stage talent into the same room. Thank you to everyone who pitched, judged, attended, and cheered. See you at the next one.

What does it look like when companies come together for a kickaround at the iconic Emirates Stadium? 🏟️ Something like this… Motivational team talks, Ray Parlour style. Leadership skills tested beyond the boardroom. And team bonding taken to the next level. We’re still processing. What a winning night!  🏆

The uploading. The reformatting. The downloading. The checking. The re-checking. It's not complex. It's just... tedious. So we fixed it with Akai. Record your process once → Akai maps every step, builds the connectors, and deploys agents that run it end-to-end on any system. And your team stays in control, always. Get early access to Akai → akai.run/