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Wasting time can be long-term productive.
The big problems you want to solve rarely give way to a brute-force solution. You have to let some things breathe so that the elegant answers can pixelate into existence before you. And so you have to fight the urge to maximize every hour and instead, as they say out in the country, ‘piddle’ around.
What feels like inefficiency in the short term can turn out to be highly effective later.
It all starts with seeking out sources of inspiration.
Depending on what you’re setting out to do, this could be anything from songs, books, posts, conversations, physical items, dreams, etc. Within any of these mediums there are gems of ideas to be found. It’s only when you dig through ‘outside of you’ material that you can find that certain style, opinion, perspective, take, or topic.
Being creative and original doesn’t mean you’re starting from scratch.
Gather your ingredients.
It’s now time to go over them with rigor.
Here’s where the logical left half of your brain really shines.
Think these discovered idea gems through. Go over them again and again consciously, A-Z, top to bottom, as much as you can. Put your mind into ‘Figuring It Out’ mode and completely exhaust it with reason & logic. This helps you cover all the known ground. You’re picking the low-hanging fruit here.
You’re not typically going to arrive at your creative insight just yet through sheer cognitive horsepower.
You’re ensuring you at least have an understanding of what you’ve gathered.
It’s the next, counterintuitive step that gets you the goods.
As a modern human, this is by far the hardest part of the process: creating space.
As addicted as you’ve now become to diving into those idea ingredients, you have to take a step back and do something completely unrelated. It sounds easy. It sounds like this would be a relief, but it’s often not a natural thing you want to do. The natural impulse is to believe you’re going to think your way there. But the truth is, your unconscious mind is going to do the work for you.
Here’s an example of how I try to incorporate this step into my own life. And it may sound small and pitiful, but it works wonders if you give it a go sometime.
Just wrote this recently and it illustrates this step perfectly:
“Ran errands today in silence.
No podcasts, no audiobooks, no music. Just my thoughts. Getting to the bottom of the bottom of what's getting to me. Letting things settle in my head.
Important to do at least once a week. Otherwise, you won't know you.
I am perfectly content to let my unconscious mind work in the background on problems I have no immediate answer to.
So much of you that you’re not consciously aware of is there 24/7 helping you.
It’s keeping track, it’s taking it all in, it’s connecting the dots you’re too zoomed in to see.
All you have to do is give it space to work on your behalf, then listen.”
Now, my example isn’t because I was using this for creativity in an artsy kind of way. As you can tell, I was doing it more for the creative solution to a life problem I’ve been grappling with.
The point still stands however. I had to give myself space from the problem so that something new could hit my mental stage.
If you’re constantly bombarding yourself with information and sensory experience, it makes it so much harder for your unconscious mind to work its magic. Even if it did do the trick and came to a grand idea, the chances of you hearing it and noticing it would be difficult if your inputs are cranked up.
Settle down.
Give it time.
Give it space.
Let the rest of you work on your behalf.
Then, at some unclear point…maybe in an hour, or a day, or a few months (depending), you can come back to it.
Which is exactly the right thing to do as you’re about to see.
After moving away from your problem, you make the return.
You won’t be the same as you were initially. You will have worked it over and let it be for a bit. Think of an amateur gardener who plants his seeds, waits 10 minutes and then digs them back up to see if they’re growing yet. That would be ridiculous, right? Except, we do this constantly with things in our lives. We backstab our faith. We undermine our trust. Repeatedly seeking answers before they’re ready. BUT, at some point they’re ready. And you can return to the original problem and see it in a new way. It will have a different feel to it, a different look. Your view will be a few degrees more wholesome, well rounded.
If this doesn’t work for whatever reason, you can also stay on step 3, in a purposefully settled-down state and let the answer come find you.
You’ll get your answer.
You’ll arrive at that insight.
But there’s one last step, to bring it on home.
It’s going to take a little refining.
Insights don’t come 100% ready for implementation. They take a bit of polishing, a bit of smoothing out. They didn’t come from the world, they came from elsewhere. You have to get them world-ready, or at least, your-life-ready. They may have a missing detail, such as how you’re going to drive there, or what your boss will say, or the local laws, or societal norms, or your current skill levels.
This is the step of integration when you clean up the insight, fit it into where it needs to go, and put it to use.
You’ve now gone through the full cycle of struggle to satisfaction.
Now, as your fabulous reward, you get to move on to the next problem.
Most comically, there’s always another one waiting for you.
:)
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H/t to Chris for inspiring me this week.
