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May 1 - June 5, 2019
Creativity—no matter how you define or apply it—needs a push, and boredom, which allows new and different connections to form in our brain, is a most effective muse. It’s what the futurist Rita King calls “the tedium of creativity.”
In one of my conversations with boredom expert Sandi Mann, she told me about some intriguing self-experimentation she did during her morning commute. She drives about an hour each way to work, and although she isn’t checking her phone, Mann usually does have the radio on the entire time. One day, though, she decided to “switch it off and just let [her] mind wander.” She continued to ride without any kind of media distraction. “By the end of my journey, I’ve usually come up with an idea for a study or for a book or how to redecorate my house or anything,” she reports. It was classic
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Most workplaces these days don’t exactly encourage quiet reflection, but they should if they want to get the most out of their employees.
“Solitude is one of our great superpowers, and it always has been.”
Writer Gary Shteyngart, another notebook fan, said, “You need to be what Saul Bellow called the great Noticer. Notice everything around you.”
As Zachary Woolf wrote in his review of Goldberg for The New York Times, the performance was masterful, “But I kept returning to that luxuriously quiet half-hour prelude. Never before had I considered silence as a commodity.”
this is what the Bored and Brilliant Project is all about: losing a little of the tools that give us a lot in the way of information, immediate productivity, and assurance in order to regain some of the simplicity and wonder that lead to deeper creativity, insight, and calm.
The thrust of essentialism is giving yourself the time and space to figure out what’s important to you and then consistently checking in with yourself to make sure you take the steps to achieve your original goals.
