One Entrepreneur's Productivity Secret: Burning Man

For Vitals founder Mitch Rothschild, the radical change in perspective that comes from a trip to the desert helps him get more done.

By JILL KRASNY, Inc.

Whip cream holsters. Topless dancers. Airplane-size sculptures. It's all part of the draw at the Burning Man festival in Black Rock, Nevada, which kicks off this week. But for one entrepreneur, all this reckless abandon has a very concrete pay-off: it's a highly effective productivity booster.

"You're completely in the desert," says Mitch Rothschild, a New York-based entrepreneur who admittedly went through 30 canisters of whip cream last year. "There's just miles and miles of flat desert expanse and you've got 65,000 people there. There's no money, no cell phones, no Internet. You get back as much as you put in." (Rothschild's distribution of whip cream was one way he gave back to attendees.)

While the festival's emphasis on personal expression no doubt stokes Rothschild's creativity, it's also renewed his perspective. "We live in a world where we're trying to get ahead," says the founder of Vitals, a doctor review site that made the Inc. 500 this year. "When you hit somewhere between the ages of 30 and 35, you ask yourself, 'Are you going to work on staying interesting and continuing to learn, or are you just going to age and fall into patterns and predictability?'"

Read more at Inc.

Angie D OGrady

Cooxist

COO Executive Leadership