"Think of your creativity like a high-performance garden: If you focus only on the visible harvest (outputs) and never allow the soil to lie fallow (liminal space) or the bees to roam freely (play), the ground eventually becomes depleted. Boredom is the signal that the soil needs replenishing, ensuring that your next season of work is a flourish rather than a struggle."
"In our current "busyness addiction," we have come to glorify the hustle, over-indexing on output while neglecting the very well-being that fuels it. We treat leisure and rest like guilty pleasures rather than sacred pauses. Yet the truth of the Imagination Era is this: Our best work often happens when we are not visibly working. To flourish in a world of ubiquitous technology and unprecedented burnout, we must stop grinding and start cultivating what I call the "sexy bits" of productivity: boredom, play, and the magical in-between of liminal space."
"It serves as a neurological cue to find new sources of stimulation. When we allow ourselves to be bored rather than reach for a digital distraction, we activate the brain's default mode network (DMN), the "meaning-making" part of the brain that connects dots, finds patterns, and synthesizes information when we are not laser-focused on external tasks. It acts like a "washing machine" for our ideas, taking deeply felt information and making sense of it."
Creativity requires deliberate downtime—boredom, play, and liminal space—to replenish mental resources and sustain high-quality output. Overemphasis on constant productivity depletes creative reserves and increases burnout while treating leisure as a guilty pleasure undermines long-term results. Boredom functions as a neurological cue that activates the brain's default mode network (DMN), enabling pattern recognition, synthesis, and meaning-making. Allowing non-goal-directed time and play cultivates ideas like letting soil lie fallow, producing richer, more flourishing creative seasons rather than strained, mechanical output.
Read at Fast Company
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]