Speaker 1: You've heard it a million times by now. You need
Speaker 1: to start meditating. Maybe you've tried like I have, but
Speaker 1: perhaps it just won't stick. Maybe you can't sit still
Speaker 1: for longer than five minutes, or maybe the whole thing
Speaker 1: feels a bit too hard. But for Brian Koppleman, the
Speaker 1: showrunner of hit TV show Billions, meditation and his routines
Speaker 1: are critical. So what are Brian's daily routines and how
Speaker 1: do they help his wandering mind stay focused on the
Speaker 1: task at hand. My name is doctor amanthe Imber. I'm
Speaker 1: an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium.
Speaker 1: And this is how I work a show about how
Speaker 1: to help you do your best work. On today is
Speaker 1: my Favorite Tip episode, we go back to an interview
Speaker 1: from the past and I pick out my favorite tip
Speaker 1: from that interview. In today's show, I speak with Brian
Speaker 1: Koppleman and we start by talking about his morning pages routine.
Speaker 2: I do it exactly as Julia Cameron describes. The only tweak, sorry,
Speaker 2: the only tweak is I meditate first. And I asked
Speaker 2: Julia when she was on my podcast, and she'd prefer
Speaker 2: if I did the pages first. And then meditated. But
Speaker 2: so I do meditate first. But then the next thing
Speaker 2: I do in my day is I open a journal
Speaker 2: and I write three Longhand pages, and I just do
Speaker 2: not stop my pen from moving. I don't race through it,
Speaker 2: but I'm I'm keeping my so I take a breath
Speaker 2: and I'm in it. I'm aware of what I'm doing,
Speaker 2: but I am just allowing myself to write. Any thought
Speaker 2: that comes down, I will not stop moving the pen,
Speaker 2: and I don't read it over. You know, if an
Speaker 2: idea come up during it that I think is useful
Speaker 2: for something, some creative project or something, I'll immediately transfer it.
Speaker 2: But then I do not go back to those pages,
Speaker 2: as she says, don't go back for five years, or
Speaker 2: maybe never go back. And it is a way to
Speaker 2: get your subconscious going. It kind of I think of
Speaker 2: it as tipping my subconscious out onto the page. It
Speaker 2: also gets rid of the detritus. Man, it's like the
Speaker 2: I think it's like the mental equivalent of drinking the
Speaker 2: water first thing in the morning and rehydrating. I somehow
Speaker 2: just feel better having done it. So that and meditation
Speaker 2: and also walks, like walking helps, exercising helps all that stuff.
Speaker 2: That just gets rid of the wanderlust or whatever it
Speaker 2: is that keeps me from doing the work. Books sometimes,
Speaker 2: I mean sometimes I'm picking up the guitar and noodling
Speaker 2: around and putting on music and reading a book. I mean,
Speaker 2: you know, straightening up there. Look, No, I don't want
Speaker 2: to paint a picture that's impossible to attain. Like, it's
Speaker 2: hard to get yourself to do the work when you're
Speaker 2: someone with ADHD and your job is to produce pages
Speaker 2: and television. It's like a hard for me. You know,
Speaker 2: it's not hard work compared to like real backbreaking work
Speaker 2: that a lot of people do, But for me, that
Speaker 2: stuff's hard. But I've gotten better and better at it
Speaker 2: and it's something I continue to work at. And I
Speaker 2: think also having a partner where I have to deliver
Speaker 2: for him helps because Dave can't hand in the script
Speaker 2: until my part's done right, so I can't be the
Speaker 2: person that's making our team suffer. And like when I
Speaker 2: wrote the one movie that I wrote alone that we made,
Speaker 2: Solitary Man with Michael Douglas, I wrote that by myself,
Speaker 2: and it was a much harder process it was before
Speaker 2: I meditated. That was twenty two thousand and nine. I
Speaker 2: think that we made that movie, and I started meditating
Speaker 2: in twenty eleven.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 2: Maybe that would have helped. But that took me years
Speaker 2: to write that movie, and partially partially, I think because
Speaker 2: it wasn't like, well, Dave's going to have his pages
Speaker 2: one Sunday, so we agreed on that, so I have
Speaker 2: to get mine one Sunday too.
Speaker 1: If you want to hear more about Brian's creative process,
Speaker 1: check out my full interview with him via the link
Speaker 1: in the show notes. If you're looking for more tips
Speaker 1: to improve the way that you work, I write a
Speaker 1: short fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things that I've
Speaker 1: discovered that helped me work better, ranging from software and
Speaker 1: gadgets that I'm loving through to interesting research findings. You
Speaker 1: can sign up for that at Howiwork dot com. That's
Speaker 1: how I Work dot co. How I Work is produced
Speaker 1: by Inventing with production support from Dead Set Studios, and
Speaker 1: thank you to Matt Nimba, who does the audio mix
Speaker 1: for every episode and makes everything sound so much better
Speaker 1: than it would have otherwise. See you next time.