Are you bored enough?

A creativity and productivity hack.

I want to make a disclaimer first. This is not a scientific article. It is my own perception and it is based on my own experience. Like many of you, I think about my self as being a creative person. But I have not been as creative as I perceive my self, lately. I do not claim, that I discovered the golden key of creativity, but I believe that being bored might help a lot. This is the basis of my article. But if you want my full thoughts, read further.

A little bit of big minds

I love physics! In my opinion, physics is the best of what human mind could achieve for centuries, and I really believe that the physicists changed the world to what we are now. The great discoveries between XII and beginning of XX century are mind blowing and we probably owe a lot to these amazing people.

Take Newton. Besides Principia, another major contribution of Sir Isaac Newton is the invention of Calculus when he was 24 years old. At the same time, the same achievement is claimed by Leibniz who was 29 at that time.

Albert Einstein was 26 when he published the Theory of Relativity. Heinrich Hertz discovered electromagnetic waves when he was 22.

Of course these are maybe the biggest minds we had as humanity. But I can see a pattern here. They were all still young and achieved mastery in their domains.

What about now?

What is a 20 something doing nowadays? And I don’t want to state that a 22 years old person living in 2024 is bad and Herts was good. We are all products of our world. I met a few and I can tell that people in their twenties are as amazing and nice as in any generation.

I have two amazing kids and I happen to notice their patterns when they are at home or when we are going into a vacation.

I have recently been in the Physics Faculty of University of Bucharest and I noticed the patterns there.

Kids are never bored

And I can say with a great degree of certainty that kids nowadays are never bored. There is always something that needs to be done. And I will not fall for social media and Internet only – that I have to admit they provide a great deal of entertainment. I am talking about their schedule.

We are filling up the schedule of our kids, since they are born till their late twenties and then they become accustomed with this pattern. We even make a big deal of being busy, associating a busy schedule with success.

We are overcharging our time with lot of activities and strive for productivity. Does it work?

Well, it does! It does if you want to achieve more by doing more work which is not necessarily bad.

but…

But do not expect creativity and breakthrough productivity. We all know that working more and faster will get us to incremental results. New habits, new ideas and change can lead to greater improvements.

Where do these come from?

My experience

There is some stuff that works for me. There is a cumulative effect of:

• being excited or bothered by something
• having a certain degree of expertise to solve the issue
• experience something new
• not being distracted by something else
• enough time

At least in my case, I need the entire mix. Let me explain.

First of all I need an emotional drive. My brain works based on emotions, therefore if there is no emotional trigger, I won’t put the work. Being excited is preferable, but being bothered works too. Anyway I cannot be triggered without emotions.

Creative productivity comes from experience. There are two kind of experiences that need to come together. They say that” if you have a hammer you will treat all the problems as needles”. To me this is being experienced with a hammer and using some creativity :). So you need some kind of expertise and a new problem or a new method or methodology. Anything new will work – even if the problem is old. Something new to your mind will make you explore new directions from which creativity might arise.

And you need to spend enough time figuring out a solution. You need to be bored enough.

I made five bullet points, out of which, the first three are easy to meet. But the last two are less and less available to the modern human since childhood to adulthood. We do not spend enough time concentrating on stuff we need to solve, undistracted.

The more busy you are the more you are acting fast forward, using the available tools you have on hand.

Always distracted by news, tasks, screes, advertisements, social media, pressure, overwork, high achievement and I can go on, we have no time left to get creative.

There is a special kind boredom

Just being bored is an understatement. Bored and tired does not help. In my opinion it works if you are bored and rested. A tired and stressed brain does not help. A tired brain needs to rest. Add some excitement. And bored might not be the right word too. Let me explain!

An ideal state is to be rested, excited about the subject and not distracted by anything else (as you can see it is a special kind of boredom). It is not the state when you are bored and you don’t give a fuck about anything.

Back to Newton

Let’s go back to Newton now. Of course I have not been there, but the legend says that Newton was at home, he was not able to live the house – I am not sure if it was a curfew or it was is decision – and he started thinking about calculus. Looks like he was having fun! 🙂

All the five bullet points from above are met.

More about creativity

I wanna say something more about creative environments. Creativity means trying something that doesn’t work, breaking things and doing it so much until it works.

Before becoming productivity, creativity must train. Training needs time. I know it might sound poetical, but Productivity is actually trained creativity. When creativity meets practice is braking things and wastes time. It needs a lot of trial and error. And feedback. And the keywords here are error and feedback. For both error and feedback it requires time and mistakes.

In most of the companies, nowadays, there is no room for error, there is no room for some extra time. We need results now, in order to report it till the next quarter. People are always busy and productive. Or not!

Therefore the innovation is sometimes externalised. We expect to pay somebody else to solve our problems, even if that somebody else does not identify with our problems. That’s why most of the computers look the same, cars look the same, and so on.

A company culture that makes people more creative, is relaxed, excited, without pressure and with people that have enough time to connect and concentrate on important issues. It leaves room for a creative boredom.

So!

If you are a manager, if you want to have creative people around you, if you want to think outside the box… you’d better ask yourself first: “Am I bored enough?”

I hope you enjoyed the reading. If so, please tell me what you think on office@corporatedynamics.ro.

I hope you are bored enough to write 🙂

by Emanoil Draganescu