Niksen by Olga Mecking

Author:Olga Mecking
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780358395089
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2021-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

The Manipulative Procrastinator

Some people procrastinate because they hope that someone will come in and rescue them from their obligations somehow. “They say, ‘Hey, if I don’t take out the trash, maybe you’ll come home and you’ll be so disgusted by the trash that you’ll just do it,’” Rubin says.

Niksen and Creativity: Why Do the Best Ideas Happen in the Shower?

“I took people off the street and took them to a soundproof room, and I asked them to leave their phones behind. And I said we want to see how you’ll feel,” says psychologist Sandi Mann. At first, people were very uncomfortable, but after a while, they eased into being there with nothing to do, and they came out feeling calmer and more relaxed. This experiment was specifically aimed at discovering whether doing nothing would make people more creative. And it did.

“I’ve given people creativity tests, and the people who were bored were more creative than the people who weren’t,” Mann explains. The creativity tests involved providing as many answers as possible to a series of word problems and the results were clear: boredom literally makes us more creative, better at problem solving, better at coming up with creative ideas. But being bored wasn’t defined as sitting in front of a computer aimlessly scrolling or tweeting your way through the day. In the experiment it was important that the mind was given space to daydream and wander free from distractions. I feel this experiment was therefore not about boredom at all. It was a study of niksen.

“We need you to be really lazy and literally be doing nothing. Let your mind be totally bored and let it search for its own stimulation,” Sandi Mann says. Maybe this is why the line between doing nothing and doing creative work can sometimes become so blurry.

Chris Bailey is an avid knitter and tells me that this helps him relax and let his mind wander. “Because of this wandering, our minds go off into places where we can connect ideas that we had in the past to problems that we’re facing in the present, to decide how we’re going to act on that problem in the future,” he explains, telling me how new creative solutions come into being.

“Mind wandering connects the constellation of ideas that are swirling around in our minds to become something new that we would not arrive at otherwise. That we would never arrive at if we were devoting our full attention to it,” says Bailey.

That’s why when we’re taking a shower, or sitting on the couch, or knitting, or niksening around, ideas come together as if by magic. This quiet, seemingly passive work is less visible and less impressive than the more obvious eureka moments, but it’s just as important.

I look at my own work and wonder, Was it the reading and constantly keeping my eyes open, the listening to what people are saying both online and offline that gave me the idea for an article? Or was it the quiet

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.