When I was in college, I drove across the country six times. Each fall, I would fuel up my Sahara-beige Mitsubishi Montero SUV for the 2,690-mile haul between my Los Angeles home and upstate New York where I attended Syracuse University. 

It was my personal Cannonball Run. Each September, I would stretch my Southern California summers as long as possible, squeezing in a few final days on Santa Monica’s sun-soaked coastline before heading to Syracuse’s blustery, gray winters. When it was time to depart, I plotted the fastest route—blowing through cities and towns along the way, oblivious to their histories, stories, and people. And when I did stop, it was simply to refuel, whip through a drive-through, or lay my head on a crunchy Motel 6 pillow for a few hours.  

The same cross-country rally occurred each spring as I blazed a path back to Southern California like a stallion returning to its stable.  

I was proud of how many hours and miles I would pack into each day’s drive, often completing my destination-obsessed journey in as little as three days (remarkably without ever receiving a ticket—although I did get a pretty stern warning from an Oklahoma State Trooper on one occasion).  

Mission accomplished, I boasted to myself and my friends. I had successfully traversed our magnificent country saying little more than “supersize, please” to the McDonald’s drive-through employee and “checking out” to the motel desk clerk.  

In hindsight, I won the race. But I lost out on the more important journey.  

I’ve been reminded of those road trips in recent months on the much shorter six-hour drives from Houston to visit my daughter in the small North Central Texas community of Abilene where she’s attending college. For the tens of thousands of drivers who barrel through this small whistle-stop city along I-20 each day, Abilene is a pit stop for gas or food at best, and a rapidly appearing and vanishing blip on their GPS screen at worst.  

Turning in-between places into think spaces 

Abilene is the quintessential “in-between place.” Like the tens of thousands of other communities that form the tapestry of America, it is easy for us to overlook the remarkable people, culture, heritage, natural beauty, and contributions these seemingly unremarkable places offer.  

Texas artist Rachel Dory suggests these “in-between roadside scenes” are familiar sites as we travel from one destination to another. Yet, as lonely as they may seem, “they help us understand and connect with one another.” 

The importance of in-between places in our personal journeys extends well beyond the “fly-over states” and “truck-stop towns” so many of us have unjustly and regrettably bypassed over the years. The power of in-between can be harvested in the in-between moments and spaces in our lives.  

This same quest for an in-between space inspired Bill Gates in the 1990s to disappear to a small, nondescript cabin perched along Oregon’s Hood Canal for what he called Think Week. The Microsoft cofounder would whisk himself from Seattle to his secret hideaway by seaplane for what he called “CPU time,” an appropriate metaphor for a software titan.?? 

In the 2019 Netflix documentary?Inside Bill’s Brain, Gates reflected on his need for his Think Week: 

“You think, Okay, do I need to read some books about this??Or who do I need to talk to about that? Some things, I say to myself—hey, I just need to think.”? 

An unaccompanied Gates would bring boxes of emails, books, and proposals that he didn’t have time for during the rest of the year.?No one was allowed to visit except for a staffer who would deliver meals to him twice a day and restock his fridge with Diet Orange Crush and Diet Coke. He would bunker down for 18 hours a day to read, think, and dream.?? 

The concept was so successful that Gates institutionalized Think Week as a grassroots ideation process among the company’s top 50 engineers.?Gates’s Think Weeks ultimately inspired the development of Microsoft Internet Explorer 95, according to a 2005 Wall Street Journal story. 

Turn down the volume to turn up your creativity 

When I worked at Starbucks as head of global corporate communications, we described the warm and welcoming ambiance of our stores as the “third place”—that familiar place in between work and home where you can connect with a friend, colleague, or client over a Grande Iced Caramel Cloud Macchiato.? 

But the vibrant coffee-shop atmosphere that makes Starbucks the perfect third place for convening with others, is a far cry from the quiet space we need to distill our biggest problems and brew our most audacious dreams.

According to a University of California, San Diego,?study, the average American is exposed to 34 gigabytes of information across print, online, digital, audio, video, and in-person channels daily. That translates to about 100,000 words every 12 hours. 

The magnitude of news, information, and noise we are exposed to provides little if any capacity for our brains to do what they are intended to do: think. 

Consequently, I’ve come to believe that what we need more than anything today is a “fourth place” in our lives. Or put another way—an “in-between-place mindset”—the attitude that we must disconnect to connect with the best of ourselves, our ideas, and our aspirations.? 

The fourth place provides a sanctuary from the noisy places that restrain our best thinking and detain our wildest ideas. And we don’t need a seaplane (in most cases) to get there. There are an abundance of?quiet fourth places all around us. You may even be reading this article in one. 

For example, when I lived in Chicago, I would ride the Metra North train to and from work?between our North Shore home and downtown Chicago. During the morning and evening rush hours the railway designated every other car a “quiet space” that meant no calls and no talking. Unless I bumped into a colleague at the train station who I wanted to continue a conversation with or was expecting an important call, I would find my way to an upper-deck seat on one of the designated “quiet” cars, put on my noise-canceling headphones, lean back and just think for the 50-minute ride. If I was headed to work, I would use the time to frame my thoughts or ideate for a meeting that day. On the ride home, I often tried to decompress by staring out the soot-stained window, watching the landscape transition from Chicago’s bustling downtown to the sleepy, tree-lined Lakeshore villages. 

One of the loudest places in Chicago—the train—was ironically one of my favorite quiet spaces.? 

Speaking of transportation, airplanes are another one of my favorite fourth-place quiet spaces. There are few experiences I look forward to more than the solitude that accompanies a long flight. The longer, the better. I often bring a small notebook on every flight (two for longer ones) and after nudging my AirPods into my ears and opening my tray table, I pull out my pen and notebook and let my ideas flow. Many of the ideas and stories in my recent articles were born in my uninterrupted think space above the clouds. 

Take your imagination on a walk 

But we don’t have to book a trans-Pacific flight to enjoy the imagination-sparking benefits of a fourth place. One of?the most convenient and catalyzing sources of think space is right outside our front doors. Whether we reside in a fourth-floor apartment in Brooklyn, a countryside estate in Ireland, or a condominium in Nairobi, we are just steps away from the ultimate fourth place—a quiet walk. Not only is a 30-minute stroll every day great for our health, but it’s also one of the best creative stimulants around.? 

Research spearheaded by Marily Oppezzo, a behavioral scientist at Stanford University, concluded that if we want to be more creative—take a walk. The study determined that people who ideate while walking alone generate twice as many creative ideas as those who participate in traditional small-group brainstorms.?? 

Most importantly, our quest for think spaces can be a soul-awakening odyssey to an inner space of self-reflection and self-realization. I have found that solitary experiences enabled through a think-space mindset evoke certainty in times of uncertainty, fearlessness in moments of fear, and motivation in the wake of devastation. 

So often we believe that at the critical, game-changing crossroads that confront us in work and life, we must seek the wisdom of others—and in many of these instances, others feel equally obligated to seek us out. Yet, all too often the volume of those well-intended voices around us mute the most important voice of all—our own.? 

Turn your inflection points into reflection points 

The most consequential inflection points often catalyze the most illuminating reflection points in our leadership journey. As Harvard leadership historian Nancy Koehn observed in this Fast Company?article, “Thoughtful crisis leaders recognize that even in the urgency of an intensifying crisis, they can adjust the pace of decision-making, thus creating space for reflection and—more often than not—for the most effective options to emerge.”? 

Koehn points to the think space U.S. President John F. Kennedy created at the apex of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis by ordering a naval quarantine of Cuba to prevent Soviet ships from transporting any more offensive weapons to the island. She suggests that the quarantine’s most important contribution was the extra time it created for leaders from both the U.S. and the Soviet Union to contemplate the catastrophic consequences of nuclear war. The think space JFK created through the quarantine resulted in the de-escalation of one of the most high-stakes military showdowns in modern history.?? 

So, as we race to the important events, places, and people in our destination-obsessed lives, getting lost in the in-between places, spaces, and moments along the way, may very well be the best way to find ourselves, our stories, and, most importantly, our shared humanity.