Some related notes:
Exhortations which help: Get curious; Get bored; Get playful
Deresiewicz, W. (2010, March 1). Solitude and Leadership. The American Scholar.
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.
The prolific letter-writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton noticed this was happening to him during his college years at Columbia University. Later in life, he wrote: “The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.”
Thick desires are like diamonds that have been formed deep beneath the surface, nearer to the core of the Earth. Thick desires are protected from the volatility of changing circumstances in our lives. Thin desires, on the other hand, are highly mimetic, contagious, and often shallow.
Andrew Sutherland on his project (2022-09 Fey Computer Festival): “My computer is full of other people’s thoughts.” (later): “I want to turn down the volume on other people’s thoughts.”
It’s extremely tempting to fill spare moments with activity: books, tasks, web browsing, chat. Culturally default behaviors fill spare time with others’ ideas; to make space for my own, I have to get comfortable with “empty” time. I find I often have to get bored before I can Get curious.
So the exhortation is: when you find yourself bored, stay with that feeling instead of immediately reaching for a book or other activity.
Productivity culture is obsessed with “deep work”, focus, etc. But a certain amount of serendipity and spontaneity is really important to creative work.
Sometimes the benefit comes from opening yourself up to unexpected inputs—so you have ideas you wouldn’t otherwise have.
At other times, it’s helpful to pay attention to those impulses to distract yourself because they may indicate subtle subconscious hunches you have—possibly useful direction to explore. Or they may help you understand that you’re actually not interested in your current project, or some element of it.
Also, just empirically, it’s usually not possible to do hard, ultra-focused creative work all day! It’s hard to do difficult creative work for more than a few hours a day
Related: Momentum as explore-exploit heuristic in creative work
https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/1411701234768171010?s=20
There’s something peculiar about being “focused”. I used to think it was bad if I got distracted. For some types of rote, necessary work it really is best just to (try to) power through. But for some associative creative work, there’s a weird half-focus state that’s helpful too