You don't have to work for Google, or any of the other firms encouraging staff to pursue personal projects on company time, to use slowness to unlock your creativity. Anyone can do it. Start by clearing space in your schedule for rest, daydreaming and serendipity. Take breaks away from your desk, especially when you get stuck on a problem.
Interpretation
Embracing slowness can enhance creativity and problem-solving abilities.
In this quote, Carl Honore emphasizes the importance of allowing oneself time and space to think creatively. By stepping away from the hustle and bustle, engaging in rest, daydreaming, and experiencing moments of serendipity, anyone can unlock their creative potential, regardless of their work environment or corporate policies.
In practice
During a creative workshop, I shared this quote to encourage participants to embrace breaks.
You may have heard of the Slow Movement, which challenges the canard that faster is always better. You don't have to ditch your career, toss the iPhone, or join a commune to take part. Living 'Slow' just means doing everything at the right speed - quickly, slowly, or at whatever pace delivers the best results.
Your best ideas, those eureka moments that turn the world upside down, seldom come when you're juggling emails, rushing to meet the 5 P.M. deadline or straining to make your voice heard in a high-stress meeting. They come when you're walking the dog, soaking in the bath or swinging in a hammock.
We know that no algorithm can solve global poverty; no pill can cure a chronic illness; no box of chocolates can mend a broken relationship; no educational DVD can transform a child into a baby Einstein; no drone strike can end a terrorist conflict. Sadly, there is no such thing as 'One Tip to a Flat Stomach.'
Sometimes it takes a wake-up call, doesn't it, to alert us to the fact that we're hurrying through our lives instead of actually living them; that we're living the fast life instead of the good life. And I think, for many people, that wake-up call takes the form of an illness.
By slowing down at the right moments, people find that they do everything better: They eat better; they make love better; they exercise better; they work better; they live better.
A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.
When we open ourselves to exploring our creativity, we open ourselves to God: good, orderly direction.
I'm not an extraordinary worker, I'm an extraordinary daydreamer. I exceed all my fantasies-even that of writing.
It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.
Do you think of yourself as a creative personality? If you do, you are both fortunate and correct, in fact the beautiful truth is that everyone is creative and we all have the ability to develop our creative potential. It is wise to remember that the person who follows the crowd will get no further than the crowd. The person who walks the creative path is likely to find they are in places no one has ever been before.
Every really good creative person in advertising has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject he could not easily get interested in...Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information. For it is with the advertising man as with the cow: no browsing, no milk.
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