The second thing that great team leaders know, and that brain scientists have shown, is that an “insight” is brain food. These scientists aren’t yet sure whether this is because insights come with a nice shot of dopamine or some other neurochemical transmitter, but what they do know is that the brain is built such that a new insight—“a feeling of knowing generated from within,” to use their phrasing—feels good.

The successful creative business leaders who speak to our classes don;t strive. They apply themselves to a task for the sheer joy of doing it. It is in this sort of effort that you, too, can experience your inner creativity.

In our Stanford classes, we recommend this: Get to work on something (almost anything) productive, with the simply (even foolish) confidence that the work that’s in front of you is part of your answer.

This hint is courtesy of Aubrey C. Daniels, author of Bringing Out the Best in People: How to Apply the Astonishing Power of Positive Reinforcement (a foundational business book that all leaders should read).

Businesses do not maximise anything. The most successful business leaders such as Marks or Walton or Gates pursued the unquantifiable, but entirely meaningful, objective of building a great business. A great business is very good at doing the things we expect it to do— rewarding its investors, providing satisfying employment, offering goods and services of good quality at reasonable prices, fulfilling a role in the community— and to fail in any of these is, in the long run, to fall in all of them.

How someone can see what others have not, or what they have ignored, and thereby discover a pivotal objective and create an advantage, lies at the very edge of our understanding, something glimpsed only out of the corner of our minds. Not every good strategy draws on this kind of insight, but those that do generate the extra kick that separates “ordinary excellence” from the extraordinary.