Sara Blakely: Daily Routine

Her best thinking happens in the car, so she invented a one-hour “commute” to nowhere just to chase it.

For self-made billionaire businesswoman and the founder of Spanx, Sara Blakely, the best time for her to do her thinking is driving in the car. A 2014 Wall Street Journal profile revealed that she actually got the idea to call her company Spanx when she was waiting at a red light, and that she “carries a large spiral-bound Mead notebook, compulsively filling it with scribbles, notes and inspirations.”

The only problem these days? Blakely lives too close to the Spanx Atlanta headquarters, resulting in a short commute and not much thinking time. Fortunately, she came up with an idea.

“I’ve identified where my best thinking happens and it’s in the car,” Blakely told Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, on his podcast Masters of Scale. “I live really close to Spanx, so I’ve created what my friends call my ‘fake commute,’ and I get up an hour early before I’m supposed to go to Spanx, and I drive around aimlessly in Atlanta with my commute so that I can have my thoughts come to me.”