Challenging work assignments, family matters, and home maintenance
projects have kept me very busy lately. Hence, the significant
drop-off in blog posts over the past couple of months. I'm hoping to
correct that soon.
Not surprisingly, I've been thinking a lot about leisure time - in
particular its benefits for creative thinking. My reflections are guided
by two lectures on the topic.
The first is a GoogleTechTalk by Dr. David M. Levy, No Time to Think. In the talk, Dr. Levy asserts that deep contemplation not only
promotes creativity but also provides a sense of calmness and
satisfaction. He further argues that deep thinking cannot be forced
directly - instead we must make ourselves available to it by seeking
out silence, and sanctuary. Dr Levy observes that this requirement for
sanctuary conflicts with modern social pressures to multi-task, remain
in constant communication, and solve issues through repetitive searches
of existing information.
The second is a lecture, Solitude and Leadership, by William Deresiewicz at West Point in 2009. The talk is deeply insightful and
worth reading in its entirety but, for this post, can be fairly
summarized by the following three points:
-
Original thinking is a core attribute of leadership.
-
Formulating original thoughts requires long periods of
concentration and distance from the thoughts of others.
-
Quiet solitude is necessary to do both.
Like Dr. Levy, Mr. Deresiewicz laments social pressures to multi-task,
remain in constant communication, and rely on existing information
to solve problems. To quote,
Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your
ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long
enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas,
or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes
be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for
yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time,
constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or
fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.
and,
Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even
The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things,
especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well
as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a
stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the
conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for
yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to
hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or
anything else.
Thinking originally about difficult problems is an activity that I
deeply enjoy and find satisfying. Like Dr. Levy and Mr. Deresiewicz, I
reached similar conclusions about distracting activities years ago and
have since guarded my time and attention vigorously. I've often been
teased for my resistance to social media. At times I've felt
self-conscious about this choice, even deficient or outdated. These
talks give me renewed confidence in my choices.
The challenge, as indicated at the outset of this post, is finding the
time to think. A hard task given the pace of modern society and the
high-tech industry in particular.
