This Fast Company article is about two entrepreneurs: Suzy Bátiz, who invented a wildly successful bathroom odor suppressing spray, and Jeff Sinelli, founder of Which-Wich, a sandwich shop that now has 500 locations. As I listened to their founding stories what interested me most was how they perceived their own creativity.
Like most of the hundreds of entrepreneurs I’ve interviewed over the last two years, they didn’t follow an entirely rational process leading step by step too a winning formula. Rather their creative ideas struck them like "a slap in the face," as Sinelli recalls. Bátiz also describes it as something she felt viscerally, “I had an experience in my body where I felt I had to do this. There was no question," as Batiz said to me.
It was an "aha moment" that they could not ignore.
In this piece I explore Suzy and Jeff’s aha moments along with what science and cognitive research tell us about these pivotal experiences. Are they the stuff of pure luck? Or simply the stories we like to tell ourselves after the fact? Or are they something else altogether? Could we multiply these aha moments in our lives by preparing for them, and being more attuned to their occurrence?
Read the piece here to find out more.