Skip to content

Personal Growth — March 1, 2015

Don’t Let Stress Fuel Your Creativity

Waiting until the last minute isn’t a healthy or productive way to produce your best stuff. Musician Dan Deacon has a unique take on creativity: draw your inspiration from boredom.

Robert Montenegro

Sign up for Big Think on Substack

The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

Subscribe

Waiting until the last minute isn’t a healthy or productive way to produce your best stuff, whether that stuff is professional or artistic in nature. Some people swear by the, “Oh shoot, my deadline is in three hours; I better get cookin'” method. As musician Dan Deacon explained this week to NPR, that’s just no way to live your life. He compares it to “building a house and lighting a fire in the basement just to see if [you] can finish the roof before it burns down [the] whole house.” Instead, Deacon has a unique take on getting the creative juices flowing — draw your inspiration from boredom:

“I started realizing how important it is to truly relax, and in relaxing, to be bored. You have to be bored. If you’re not bored, your mind is never gonna wander, and if your mind never wanders, you’re never gonna get lost in thought, and you’re never gonna find yourself thinking things you wouldn’t have otherwise thought.”

Deacon’s thoughts on inspiration are similar to those famously espoused by the prolific mystery writer Agatha Christie, who declared idleness, not necessity, to be the mother of invention.

Read more at NPR.

Photo credit: Ollyy / Shutterstock

Sign up for Big Think on Substack

The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

Subscribe

Related

Book cover for "Irresistible Change: A Blueprint for Earning Buy-In and Breakout Success" by Phil Gilbert, featuring “an excerpt from Phil Gilbert” text set against a purple background.

How to land “the emotional why” of company change

The greatest companies navigate change at speed and make it stick at scale. Here’s how IBM started that journey in 2012.

Scott Britton, in business attire, sits cross-legged on a desk meditating, while blurred figures move in the background.

How to be ambitious without losing your soul

Former tech founder Scott Britton wants to shatter the binary myth that separates driving ambition from inner development.

A bald man in a blue suit and white shirt stands outdoors in Silicon Oasis, smiling, with autumn leaves and a blurred building in the background.

Silicon Oasis? How a northern English tech startup went global

We chat with Mark Klarzynski, founder of PEAK:AIO, on how his company became an international player in data storage for the age of AI.

A man in a suit stands facing a large human eye, positioned at the center of the pupil as if about to step inside.

The science of consciousness is solving the biggest illusion in our universe

“Consciousness is fundamental. It’s a fundamental property of the world that we inhabit, a fundamental property of the universe.”

▸

1:12:16 min

—

with

A bearded man wearing glasses and a plaid shirt speaks with a microphone clipped to his collar in front of a purple background with white dots.

How Rainn Wilson discovered sacredness

The hospital where Rainn Wilson’s wife and son nearly died became his own personal holy site. There, he discovered that the sacred can exist in places we least expect it. During his talk at A Night of Awe and Wonder, he explained how the awe we feel in moments of courage and love is moral beauty — and following it might be the start of our spiritual revolution.

▸

13 min

—

with

Up Next

Personal Growth

Sleeping Longer Hours May be a Stroke Risk

In a long-term study of nearly 10,000 individuals, a team of scientists at Cambridge University found that sleeping more than eight hours per night correlates with a higher risk of stroke.