Beer Mode and Coffee Mode
Creatives have two ways of working: Beer Mode and Coffee Mode. Beer Mode is a state of unfocused play, where you discover new ideas. Coffee Mode is a state of focused action, where you work towards a specific outcome.
The problem with traditional productivity advice is that it doesn’t take Beer Mode seriously. Standard advice like “turn off the Internet,” “tune out distractions,” and “turn towards your goals,” are all examples of Coffee-Mode thinking. The productivity world is oriented around Coffee Mode because it’s easy to define, easy to measure, and therefore, easier to write about.
Meanwhile, Beer Mode is filled with surprises that are impossible to predict. On most days, you feel like you’ve wasted time because you haven’t made a breakthrough discovery. But once in a while, Beer Mode leads to an intellectual breakthrough that would have never happened in Coffee Mode. In turn, those Beer-Mode breakthroughs inform how you should allocate your focused, Coffee-Mode time.
John Cleese of Monty Python, who coined the analogous ideas of “open mode” and “closed mode,” went as far as to say that “creativity is not possible in closed mode.” In closed mode, we’re too focused on our to-do lists and fueled by productive stress. Writing about open mode, Cleese says,
“By contrast, the open mode is a relaxed… expansive… less purposeful mode… in which we’re probably more contemplative, more inclined to humor (which always accompanies a wider perspective) and, consequently, more playful. It’s a mode in which curiosity for its own sake can operate because we’re not under pressure to get a specific thing done quickly. We can play, which allows our natural creativity to surface.”
Cleese offers the example of Alexander Fleming, the Nobel Prize-winning inventor of Penicillin, which saved somewhere between 80 million and 200 million lives. One day, in a state of intellectual wandering, Fleming noticed a Petri dish near an open window. The day before, he had uncovered a Petri dish that was contaminated with mold. But looking at the dish that day, he noticed that the bacteria near the mold was dying. He isolated the mold and identified it as the Penicillium genus. To his surprise, it was effective against the gram-positive pathogens which caused diseases like diphtheria, gonorrhea, meningitis, pneumonia, and scarlet fever.
Reflecting on his discovery, Fleming said, “I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I suppose that was exactly what I did.”
Fleming may have only discovered Penicillin because he was in Beer Mode. If he’d seen the moldy dish in Coffee Mode, it might have looked irrelevant. But because he was in a state of play and openness, it turned into a clue that led to one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century.
The lessons of Fleming’s discovery are hard to implement because, as goal-oriented humans, we want to be in control. We hate uncertainty, but uncertainty is at the core of Beer Mode. Beer Mode is aimless, but you don’t always have to be out of control to be creative. Coffee Mode and Beer Mode work in tandem.
The see-saw of Beer Mode and Coffee Mode is like breathing. Your best ideas emerge when you balance the inhale of Beer Mode with the exhale of Coffee Mode. Coffee Mode rewards action, while Beer Mode rewards laughter. Coffee Mode rewards focus, while Beer Mode rewards conversation. And while Coffee Mode rewards clarity, Beer Mode rewards serendipity.
Our best ideas rarely come alive in busyness. They spring to life in calm and aimless contemplation. In Beer Mode, you find inspiration. And in Coffee Mode, you harvest that inspiration. If you only spend time in Coffee Mode, you’ll shut yourself off to transformative ideas because the fruits of genius are sown with the seeds of Beer-Mode wanderings.
