Think Slow, Work Deliberately

Hustle is necessary, but boredom is the mother of invention

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What’s keeping you from accomplishing your short-term goals and pursuing your long-term dreams?

Life is busy and full of hardship, heartache, and challenges, and all of these things get in the way.

But I don’t think that’s the biggest obstacle.

If you’re anything like me, you are your own worst enemy when it comes to the Subtle Art of Getting Shit Done. (You’re welcome for your sequel title, Mark Manson.)

It’s February 1st, and I still haven’t written down a single goal for 2024.

Not one.

Which means I haven’t actually committed to anything. Which means I’m not working toward anything. I can neither fail nor succeed if I have no benchmark to measure by.

A couple things I think I should probably do keep bouncing around in my head, but without any kind of structure or accountability, they will just keep on bouncing. One day will flow into another, and if I don’t make a change, I’ll just keep hitting snooze on what needs doing.

Next thing you know, it’ll be December again. Another year gone. Another giant spread of opportunities wasted.

It pains me to admit how unstructured I am. Disorganized. Driven by inspiration and feelings. My creativity has always felt deeply tied to my emotional center. If everything is going well in my life, and I find a way to minimize distractions, I can usually produce good work, if enough pressure is applied. But if I’m stressed out, behind on errands and obligations, short on money, had an argument with my wife, am dealing with too much angst from my kids, having one of those days where I’m processing childhood crap I never dealt with that broke off and floated to the surface like some weird, mid-life, Titanic-killing iceberg, etc., I’m virtually useless. I can’t get in the zone.

This is such a liability as a creative, and it’s probably the thing I would change first about myself if I had a magic wand. I want to be consistent. I want to be a man of good habits and structured approaches to problems. I want to keep the resolutions I make. I want to actually remember the resolutions I make.

There are probably lots of reasons why I’m like this. I can think of half a dozen possible excuses and explanations.

Who cares?

The only utility in figuring out how you got the way you are is if it helps you figure out how to overcome it to become who you want to become.

You have to tame your brain. (I’m telling myself. If you needed to hear it too, well, I’m happy to help.)

I don’t want to speak for any of you, but I am increasingly aware of certain habits I have that are both extremely satisfying and wildly counterproductive. Like my driving need to seek constant mental stimulation and thought-provoking interactions, which means I rack up way more social media hours than I should.

The irony is, social media — X/Twitter in particular — is also so damn useful in terms of understanding current social dynamics, emerging topics, and useful perspectives. The kind of stuff a guy like me uses as fuel for writing.

For example, I ran across this recently, and boy did it hit home:

After observing a similar habit among highly creative people (Einstein, Mozart, da Vinci, etc), the neuroscientist Dr. Nancy Andreasen designed a brain-imaging study to understand the neural basis of this habit.

Essentially, these creative people all carved out time each day for...

“Free-floating periods of thought,” Andreasen writes in her book, “The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius.”

The mechanics of the habit differed from person to person.

Leonardo da Vinci, for example, would often sit in front of a painting “and simply think, sometimes for as long as a half day.”

Whereas Einstein had a wooden boat he called the “Tinef” (Yiddish for “piece of junk”) on which he liked to aimlessly drift wherever he could find a body of water. He had to be rescued by boaters or the Coast Guard so frequently that a friend eventually bought him an outboard motor for emergency use, but Einstein refused it.

“To the average person, being becalmed for hours might be a terrible trial,” the friend said. “To Einstein, this could simply provide more time to think.”

In any case, Dr. Andreasen conducted the first study of brain activity during these “free-floating periods of thought,” when the body is in a “resting state” and the mind is free of inputs, and therefore, free to wander.

“We found activations in multiple regions of the association cortex,” Dr. Andreasen wrote. “We were not [seeing] a passive silent brain during the ‘resting state,’ but rather a brain that was actively connecting thoughts and experiences.”

Essentially, Dr. Andreasen found that the brain defaults to creativity.

When the body is still and the mind is allowed to float freely, the brain engages in what she termed REST (“random episodic silent thinking”).

And during REST, Dr. Andreasen writes, the brain “uses its most human and complex parts...areas known to gather information and link it all together—in potentially novel ways.”

So whether it's sitting in front of painting in your office or on a piece of wood out at sea, if you want to be more creative, carve out time each day for “free-floating periods of thought.”

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“Men of genius are sometimes producing most when they seem least to labor, for their minds are then occupied in the shaping of those conceptions to which they afterward give form.” — Leonardo da Vinci

Making time for “free-floating thought” is incredibly important.

You’ve no doubt experienced this yourself. “Shower thoughts” are often amazing. So are walking thoughts, driving thoughts, and absent-minded daydreaming thoughts.

This is no fluke. It’s how we’re wired:

In a 2019 study, 98 professional writers and 87 physicists recorded their most creative idea each day, as well as what they were doing and thinking when it struck them.

While most of the ideas occurred at work, 20 percent of their most meaningful ideas came while doing something else — washing dishes or taking a shower. Notably, the ideas the writers and physicists had away from their jobs were self-assessed to be just as creative and important as the ones they had at work.

[…]

One study of more than 1,100 respondents reported that their moments of insight came during mind-wandering in the shower (30 percent), in transit (13 percent) or during exercise (11 percent).

There is a “sweet spot” to how engaging the activity is and its impact on creative thought: too little, and it is boring; too much, and it leaves little attention for ideating.

A September study reported that having free-flowing, spontaneous thoughts during a moderately engaging activity, but not a boring one, boosted creativity.

There’s a scientific reason for all of this:

Leo Widrich explains the science of creativity on the Buffer blog. Essentially, our brains give us our best ideas when:

• A lot of dopamine is released in our brains. Triggers like exercising, listening to music, and, yes, taking a warm shower, contribute to increased dopamine flow.

• We're relaxed. When we have a relaxed state of mind, we're more likely to turn attention inwards, able to make insightful connections. We've seen before how being drunk and sleepy are great for creativity.

• We're distracted. Distraction gives our brains a break so our subconscious can work on a problem more creatively. (This is similar to John Cleese's advice to let your ideas bake.)

A dopamine high, relaxed state, and distracted mind: No wonder great ideas happen in the shower.

We all know how powerful the insights that come from these activities can be. But how often do we intentionally remove ourselves from mental stimulation to allow ourselves to relax and let our minds wander?

Although I know it’s true from personal experience, forcing myself to put down my phone or close my open tabs and just slow down and think is so hard some days, you’d think I was trying to resist the allure of the One Ring.

Better understanding our own minds and how to tap into their nearly limitless potential is something very much worth our time. Screens draw us in because they promise an endless stream of stimulation. But although they push the dopamine button (which keeps us coming back for more) they are lacking the relaxed, distracted, absent, going-on-autopilot qualities that spark our creativity.

They hold our attention so firmly that it is not allowed to wander in search of something worth paying attention to on its own.

To get creative, I have to make myself do very boring, analog tasks. I have to slow down. I have to turn off the music and the books and the podcasts and just drive in silence and let my mind wander. I have to spend that extra five minutes in the shower just letting the hot water run as my thoughts take flight on their own. I have to put my phone down while I’m outside smoking a cigar and stare off into the clouds. I have to make the time to meditate and train my mind to visualize. I have to read lots of random stuff that may seem unrelated, looking for patterns that emerge. I have to practice what I call link drowning, that thing where you start researching a topic of interest and just keep following links within whatever you’re reading to another thing and another until you wind up somewhere weird and fascinating and, if you’re lucky, inspiring enough to get you thinking differently.

In other words: in order to produce quality writing, or music, or art, or film, or whatever your personal creative outlet is, you have to do a lot of things that look and feel a lot like wasting time. The feeling of guilt that many of us have when we become aware that we are wasting time is the enemy here. The admonishing voice (a teacher, parent, or spouse perhaps) asking you what you’re doing or telling you to stop daydreaming and get to work needs to talk to the mental hand.

This can all be really uncomfortable, and takes practice and intentionality.

For example, while I agree wholeheartedly with Jim Hopper that “mornings are for coffee and contemplation,” I must confess that too much stillness and solitude make me uncomfortable.

My interior, mental landscape is like a kicked hornet’s nest. Too busy to get meaningful information from without a sufficient counterbalance of autonomous activity, like driving a familiar route, or soaping and shampooing like I’ve done a million times before. One of the reasons I write is so I can pluck my inchoate thoughts from the pandemonium within and give them concrete shape. I can turn clouds into dirt, fertile and ready for planting.

But to even know which thoughts are worth harvesting, I have to access that part of my brain. That almost never comes from attempting to force it. Have you ever had to try to be creative on command? It’s almost impossible unless you’re really practiced in it. You’re much more likely to have a Eureka! moment about the problem you’re trying to solve when you’re doing something almost totally unrelated than by trying to force a solution to come to mind.

Which brings me to the new slogan I’ve just minted. A mantra, as it were, that I want to repeat to myself to help get my habits on track:

Think slow, work deliberately.

I originally wrote this out as, “Think slow. Work Fast.” But that’s not quite right. Because while you need hustle and drive and the ability to execute in a timely fashion, it’s far more important to achieve quality than speed. And to ensure that your work is actually deliberate, you need to take the time to allow your mind to cook up the worthwhile things to produce. Once you’ve got the inspiration figured out, the work will take care of itself. You will feel focused, free, and satisfied with the outcome.

So if you’re struggling to come up with your next big idea, try giving yourself that extra five minutes under the hot water or take the long way home with the radio off. Walk away from your screen and write your ideas down on actual paper.

You may be surprised to see what happens.