Using Mindfulness to Unlock Creativity

How meditation can help build a culture of original ideas.

There is a growing trend with workplaces trying to be become more efficient at innovation. The culture is biased toward rewarding accelerated pace, agile development and more efficient cost management. However, these same workplaces generally fall back on their habitual ways of dealing with day-to-day issues.

When asked to innovate in rapid succession, we tend to only ever evolve what’s already been done, we lack the ability to craft novel ideas and think outside the box. In other words, we think creating efficiencies is the antithesis to cultivating innovation. And yet, in order for innovation to succeed within the complexities of 21st century design, we as designers need to think more creatively.

So how do we allow rapid agility and creativity to thrive together in the workplace? Well we start by shifting our mindset. By resetting the intention of thought by slowing down the mind and taking time away.

I first began experimenting with a mindfulness practice as a way to help create harmony in the workplace. What I discovered was the immensely positive impact it had on the creative process.

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Bruce Gibney, the Founders Fund partner who criss-crossed the country raising its fourth fund of $625 million, has left the firm, multiple industry sources confirm. Details of why he departed are unavailable at this time, but we understand he’ll be going to work at a holding company or a portfolio company. Gibney championed the Founders Fund philosophy that startups should change the world, not just build a business.

Sources say that Gibney’s exit has been in the works for weeks, and he’s no longer with Founders Fund despite still being listed as a partner on its website. Gibney hung back from much of the firm’s investment activity, and was brought in specifically to help it raise its last fund. He also put together Founders Fund’s participation in TaskRabbit’s $13 million Series C in July of this year.

Gibney was an early investor in PayPal, which is how he got close to Founders Fund’s eventual head honcho Peter Thiel, the payment company’s co-founder. After PayPal was acquired by eBay, Thiel offered Gibney a job at his new hedge fund Clarium Capital. There Gibney advised Thiel in support of his early $500,000 investment in Facebook, which turned into a massive windfall. You can learn more about the relationship between the two in this profile by Asian Venture Capital Journal.

In the valley, Gibney was known as extremely smart and in possession of keen marketing skills. A year ago he told our editor Alexia Tsotsis that “the complexity of the problems we face as a species may exceed our ability to solve them.” By pushing startups towards big ideas, and pushing Founders Fund to bank roll them, Gibney hoped to solve them and etch his name in the history books.

Gibney once told AVCJ that “At the end of my career, I’d like to point to five or six companies where the CEO believes I contributed something more than just capital – even if it’s just one terrific piece of advice. That’s what would make me happy.”