Bored and Brilliant
How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self
Manoush Zomorodi is the host of WNYC’s (New York’s public radio station) popular podcast and show called Note to Self. She decided to do a little challenge with her listeners. 20,000 (!) people participated in her 7-day “Bored and Brilliant” challenge. This book is the result of all she (and her community) learned. Big Ideas we cover include how to drop into your default mode (aka imagination engine) via boredom, daydreaming (three ways to do it: the good, the bad and the ugly!), challenge #1: observe yourself! (plus the other six), doing deep work (the 4 rules), and essentialism 101 (the 3 steps).
Big Ideas
- Bored and brilliantDrop into your default mode.
- Daydreaming + Mind-wandering: The good, bad and UglyThe good, the bad, and the ugly.
- Challenge #1: Observe YourselfPlus the other six.
- Doing Deep WorkIs always wise.
- Essentialism 101What’s essential? Eliminate. Focus.
“With so many big questions stemming from my central quandary, I dived into trying to understand what happens when we constantly keep our brains busy and never give ourselves time to mentally meander. I spoke with neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists about ‘mind-wandering’—what our brains do when we’re doing nothing at all, or not fully focused on a task.
We may feel like we are doing very little when we endlessly fold laundry, but our brains are actually hard at work. When our minds wander, we activate something called the ‘default mode,’ the mental place where we solve problems and generate our best ideas, and engage in what’s known as ‘autobiographical planning,’ which is how we make sense of our world and our lives and set future goals. The default mode is also involved in how we try to understand and empathize with other people, and make moral judgments.
When we let ourselves space out and our mind wander, we do our most original thinking and problem solving; without distraction, your mind can go to some interesting and unexpected places. 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. …
According to Dr. Jonathan Smallwood, professor of cognitive neuroscience and an expert in mind-wandering at the University of York, ‘In a very deep way, there’s a close link between originality and creativity and the spontaneous thoughts we generate when our minds are idle.’ In other words, you have to let yourself be bored to be brilliant.”
~ Manoush Zomorodi from Bored and Brilliant
I got this book after my dear friend Pilar Gerasimo (founding editor of Experience Life magazine) said all the cool kids were enjoying it.
Now, when Pilar recommends a book, I listen. So, of course, I immediately went to Amazon to pick it up. A book all about how important it is to master our relationship with technology grounded in the neuroscience and cognitive science of “mind-wandering”? Yep. I’m in!
Manoush Zomorodi is the host of WNYC’s (New York’s public radio station) popular podcast and show called Note to Self. She decided to do a little challenge with her listeners. 20,000 (!) people participated in her 7-day “Bored and Brilliant” challenge. This book is the result of all she (and her community) learned. (Get a copy here.)
It’s a fun, quick read packed with Big Ideas on how, as per the sub-title, “spacing out can unlock your most productive and creative self.” Spacing out leads to you being more productive and creative? Science says: Yep.
I’m excited to share some of my favorite Big Ideas we can apply to our lives TODAY so let’s jump straight in!
Download MP3
Download PDFThis 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.
Get the BookBored and brilliant
“You could say that boredom is an incubator lab for brilliance. It’s the messy, uncomfortable, confusing, frustrating place one has to occupy for a while before finally coming up with the winning equation or formula. This narrative has been repeated many, many times.The Hobbit was conceived when J.R.R. Tolkien, a professor at Oxford, ‘got an enormous pile of exam papers there and was marking school examinations in the summer time, which was very laborious, and unfortunately also boring.’ When he came upon one exam page a student had left blank, he was overjoyed. ‘Glorious! Nothing to read,’ Tolkien told the BBC in 1968. ‘So I scribbled on it, I can’t think why, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” And so, the opening line of one of the most beloved works of fantasy fiction was born. Steve Jobs, who changed the world with his popular vision of technology, famously said, ‘I’m a big believer in boredom. … All the [technology] stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too.’ In a Wired piece by Steven Levy, the cofounder of Apple—nostalgic for the long, boring summers of his youth that stoked his curiosity because ‘out of curiosity comes everything’—expressed concern about the erosion of boredom from the kind of devices he helped create.”
That’s from Chapter 1 in which Manoush walks us through the history of boredom while establishing the fact that a) it’s pretty much always been there and b) it serves a valuable evolutionary purpose and c) it activates a “neural network in the brain called the default mode” (that some scientists call “the imagination network”) (think: taking a shower, going for a walk, petting your poochie, etc.) thru which some of our best ideas appear.
First: How awesome is that J.R.R. Tolkien story? That’s one way to stumble into your Life’s Work, eh? (Side note: Emerson and I have already hammered through all seven Harry Potter books and we’re working on The Chronicles of Narnia now. Can’t wait for The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings series!! :)
Then we have Steve Jobs. Loved boredom. And, of course, he led the charge in creating the technology that has simultaneously created infinite opportunities for awesome AND infinite opportunities for distraction.
Manoush shares the same stories we feature in our Notes on Irresistible. Did you know Jobs (and a TON of other tech executives) don’t let their kids use the technology they created? Yep.
Adam Alter’s wisdom (in Irresistible) is worth reviewing: “It seemed as if the people producing tech products were following the cardinal rule of drug dealing: never get high on your own supply. This is unsettling. Why are the world’s greatest public technocrats also its greatest private technophobes? Can you imagine the outcry if religious leaders refused to let their children practice religion?”
Manoush quotes another guy who says that the only people who refer to their customers as “users” are drug dealers and… technologists.
Kinda makes you scratch your head and say, “Hmmmm…”
In any case, we’re going to want to Optimize our relationship with technology so we can pull our eyes and minds off the screen long enough to decompress and let our minds wander!
More on how to do that in a moment. First, let’s look at various forms of mind-wandering…
Golden Krishna, an expert in user experience who currently works on design strategy at Google, astutely pointed out during one of our conversations that the only people who refer to their customers as ‘users’ are drug dealers—and technologists.
Our devices aren’t going anywhere; they are a permanent part of the modern world. Still, that doesn’t mean distraction has to be.
Daydreaming + Mind-wandering: The good, bad and Ugly
“There are obviously different ways to daydream or mind-wander—and not all of them are productive or positive. In his seminal book The Inner World of Daydreaming, psychologist Jerome L. Singer, who has been studying mind-wandering for more than fifty years, identifies three different styles of daydreaming:
poor attention control
guilty-dysphoric
positive-constructive”
Daydreaming.
Did you know there are a few different ways to do it? Yep.
Professor Jerome Singer has been studying the subject for FIFTY years! (Wow. Need to get his book on Daydreaming.) He tells us there are three primary styles of daydreaming.
Here’s the super-quick look.
First, you might just have “poor attention control”—and have a difficult time focusing on *anything* (including your daydreaming!). That’s obviously not ideal. Ideally, we’d be able to focus our attention at will and then let it go at will.
Then we have “guilty-dysphoric.” When mind-wandering is “dysphoric,” our thoughts drift to some negative places that aren’t positive or productive. Perhaps we ruminate on things and drive ourselves a little nutty in the process. Again, sub-optimal. We want to notice this and spit our cuds as per this +1.
And, finally, we have “positive-constructive” daydreaming. THIS, of course, is where we want to spend our time.
As Manoush says: “The flip side of dysphoric daydreaming, the positive-constructive kind, is when our thoughts veer toward the imaginative. We get excited about the possibilities that our brain can conjure up seemingly out of nowhere, like magic. This mode of mind-wandering reflects our internal drive to explore ideas and feelings, make plans, and problem solve.”
<- THAT’s the healthy default mode. We integrate our sense of who we are, do what researchers call “autobiographical planning” (aka think about our future selves in relation to where we are and have been) and digest all the interpersonal and moral challenges we face all day every day.
Guess what?
If you don’t give yourself time to just space out and do that integration you’ll get all wound up and stressed out and emotionally exhausted.
That’s the 1, 2, 3 of daydreaming.
Quick check in before we go to the first challenge to actually create a little more space to space out: How do YOU spend your daydreaming time?
Now we’re ready for the first challenge…
It makes me think of Marina Abramovic’s insight into people’s fear of handing over their devices before her musical concert: ‘You think that you are disconnected. But the question is, what are you disconnected from? You’re actually constantly disconnected from yourself by having all of these things.’
Challenge #1: Observe Yourself
“The very first challenge in the Bored and Brilliant program is simply to take a good hard look at your true digital usage. Noticing and understanding your baseline behavior from the moment you wake up until you go to sleep is the first step in taking control of it.
Without skipping a single battle on Clash of the Clans or a stalking session on Google, observe yourself and take notes. You can use an app, keep track on your device, or go old school with a pen or pencil and notebook. The important thing is to accurately report how often you check your phone. What are you checking—e-mail, social media, missed phone calls, directions, the weather? Do you read on your phone? What do you read—those long e-mails from your mom, The New York Times, or hashtags on Instagram? When do you pull it out most? Or is it always in your hand, even while walking down the street, waiting on line, between appointments, or in transit? Are you alone or do you use it when you’re in a meeting or with another person socially? Do you take it to the bathroom with you? These questions are just to get you thinking. Ask yourself whatever feels most relevant. The only requirement is that you answer honestly.”
Welcome to Challenge #1: Observe Yourself!
Several things come to mind. First, Peter Drucker. His first rule of time management in The Effective Executive? Observe yourself! Specifically: Know where your time is currently going.
Then there’s Darren Hardy in The Compound Effect. He tells us: “Right this moment: Pick an area of your life where you most want to be successful. Do you want more money in the bank? A trimmer waistline? The strength to compete in an Iron Man event? A better relationship with your spouse or kids? Picture where you are in that area, right now. Now picture where you want to be: richer, thinner, happier, you name it. The first step toward change is awareness. If you want to get from where you are to where you want to be, you have to start by becoming aware of the choices that lead you away from your desired destination. Become very conscious of every choice you make today so you can begin to make smarter choices moving forward.”
Same thing with your tech usage. We’ve gotta start by tracking how we’re currently doing. Don’t even try to change—just observe and track.
And… Good news: Psychologists have actually noticed that behavior tends to change the moment you start observing it. They call it the Hawthorne effect. (We talked about it in the context of an experiment in which randomly assigned people who had a pedometer walked a mile (!) more per day than those who don’t.)
For now, if you’re feeling it, start observing yourself! Easy ways Manoush recommends: Download the Moment app (for Apple users) or the Break-Free app (for Android users).
Here’s a super-quick look at the 7 Challenges (cruise on over here for the podcasts on each!)
CHALLENGE ONE: Observe Yourself.
Yep. Just discussed!
CHALLENGE TWO: Keep Your Devices out of Reach While in Motion.
Manoush is all about baby steps. This challenge is simple: Are you moving? Keep your phone out of your hand/pocket!
CHALLENGE THREE:
Photo-Free Day.
Just like it sounds. Quit snapping pictures of every single thing in your day. There’s fascinating research that all that picture-taking *diminishes* your memories while, of course, taking you out of the moment so…
CHALLENGE: FOUR
: Delete That App.
What’s the #1 app you’re most addicted to? Yah. THAT one. Delete it. That (gulp!) is today’s challenge. Need some motivation? Get this: If you spend 25 minutes a day on something that adds up to TWO YEARS (!!) of your life.
CHALLENGE: FIVE: Take a Fakecation.
Idea: Create an autoresponder that says you’ll be out of email for x period of time—even if it’s just a matter of hours so you can go deep and avoid all the “microintrusion” papercutting your productivity w/out feeling bad!
CHALLENGE
SIX: Observe Something Else
.
Slow down for a moment (or three) today and just OBSERVE what’s happening. What do you see?
CHALLENGE SEVEN: The Bored and Brilliant Challenge.
This is a fun one where you identify an area in your life in which you currently feel confused. Then you carve out 30 minutes of quiet time, deliberately make yourself bored (by watching a pot of water boil or writing 0, 1, 0, 1 over and over again for a whole page) THEN put your mind to solving the problem you identified.
Note: Manoush tells us that the most people though keeping their phones out of sight was the most useful thing they practiced in the challenge. Remember The iPhone Effect? It’s real.
If one oversteps the bounds of moderation, the greatest pleasures cease to please.
Your instructions for today: Delete it. Delete *that* app. ... You know which one is your albatross. The one you use too much. The one you use to escape—too often, at the expense of other things (including sleep). The one that makes you feel bad about yourself. Delete said time-wasting, bad-habit app. Uninstall it.
Doing Deep Work
“The real casualty of all this distraction is the ‘deep work.’ In his book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport of Georgetown University’s computer science department defines the term as ‘the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.’ He writes that this ability, which allows for mastery of complicated information, is ‘one of the most valuable skills in our economy’ while at the same time becoming ‘increasingly rare.’”
It’s impossible to talk about being bored and brilliant without talking about doing deep work.
In fact, Manoush has an entire chapter on it called “Doing the Deep Work.”
As you probably know by this stage, I love Cal. One of the great joys of my work has been connecting with over 100 of the authors I’ve profiled. But, I’m biased. Cal is my favorite and I feel blessed to consider Cal a dear friend these days. I feel like a kid playing ping-pong as we bounce strategic and philosophical ideas back and forth in our always-intense and equally inspiring chats.
But that’s not the point of this Idea. Deep Work is.
So… If you haven’t read the Note AND the book yet, please do. It’s life-changingly epic. Seriously. I rarely ask you to trust me but trust me on this one.
Now for a recap of “The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.”
And, here’s the full definition again: “Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity. We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities.”
And, this is always worth reminding ourselves if we’re committed to doing superhero-style work: “Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, ‘the superpower of the 21st century.’”
And, finally, do you recall “The Four Rules of Deep Work”? (Neither did I.) Here they are:
Rule #1: Work Deeply
(Check! We covered that.)
Rule #2: Embrace Boredom
(Aha! Embrace boredom!! In other words, don’t reach for your phone whenever you have a spare 3 seconds. Embrace. That. Boredom!! But only if you want to go deep and be superhero-brilliant.)
Rule #3: Quit Social Media Rule
(You seen Cal’s Ted Talk on
yet? Pure genius.)
Rule #4: Drain the Shallows
(aka Quit wasting your time on stupid stuff. Check out our
on
The Shallows
for more.)
Our new cheer (sing it with me as I wave some pom poms!):
“1. 2. 3. 4. Let’s get bored and gooooooo Deep!”
The most important thing to acknowledge is that it’s an unfair fight. On one side is a human being who’s just trying to get on with her prefrontal cortex, which is a million years old and in charge of regulating attention. That’s up against a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen, whose daily job is to break that and keep you scrolling on the infinite feed.
Essentialism 101
“Greg McKeown has made an entire business out of helping people figure out how they should spend their time. His leadership training company, This, Inc., works with high-level executives from Google, LinkedIn, and Pixar, helping them hone the precepts laid out in his bestselling book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.
McKeown’s method is geared toward figuring out what matters most to you and ‘designing a life’ around that thing. He breaks the process down into three basic steps, the first of which is ‘to create space in our lives to figure out what is essential.’ Step two is to ‘eliminate all the nonessential activities.’ The third and last is to reallocate the resources that have been freed up and invest them in pursuing those things we’ve decided matter most.”
Ultimately, changing behavior comes down to motivation. We’ve gotta Make the CONNECTION between our most important goals and the time we’re wasting with stupid stuff.
How about we take a moment to reflect on McKeown’s simple three step process?
Step 1
.
What’s essential for you? (Create the space to figure that out.)
Step 2
.
Eliminate all the stuff that’s NOT essential. (That’s a lot of free time.)
Step 3
.
Invest all that bonus time in what matters. (Optimize your meaning and mojo!)
Want to be brilliant? Be willing to bored.
What’s one little thing you can do to flip on your brain’s super-powerful “default mode” imagination engine?
Here’s to your epic brilliance, my friend!
Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself.
About the author
