I remember about 10 years ago, I started to get into prestige TV.
I watched a pilot where the main character, smoked, boozed, slept around, watched movies and did basically everything other than what his actual job was. He had a huge career defining deadline looming and yet he had nothing. He doodled, interviewed people smoking the cigarette brand he was supposed to make an ad for, and talked to people about his ideas. But doesn't do much else.
He walks into the big meeting unprepared.
For most of the meeting he is quiet, contemplative. It's clear that he has nothing. Until the tobacco executives are about to leave.
And then like a flash he gets the idea. And the idea is brilliant. Hell it's so good, I'll just link to the scene below:
Mad Men quickly became my favorite show of all time. The show is about many things, but people don't often talk about how it's a hidden story about how creativity works in practice.
The pilot reminded me of an old – almost certainly apocryphcal – Rockfeller bit.
One of Rockfeller's business partner walks into his office and sees everybody working insanely as usual. But next to Rockfeller's office, as usual, he sees a young man spending hours in a nice office staring out into space and smoking a cigarette. He asks someone, who is that? They respond, "The right hand man to Rockfeller he's the highest paid employee here." The business partner is surprised. That man who is always doing nothing?
Later he asks Rockfeller why the young man doing nothing is his right hand man. Why is he the highest paid employee? He literally has been staring into space and smoking for hours.
Rockfeller responds, that's what he was doing when he came up with his last million dollar idea.
The obvious thesis here is that creative people often look like they're doing nothing.
But ideas are often nurtured through slow bouts of unproductivity emerging unexpectedly.
Here's the question that underlies all creativity:
What's the difference between doing nothing and nothing-seeming?
There are a few answers here (and perhaps I'll write more about this later). But I want to focus on one that's suggested in the quote that opens this piece.
The people who are creative have the right petri dishes.
You have to create a social, physical, mental, and digital environment in which you allow yourself to play (rather than succumb to addictions). You need to build a petri dish that allows creativity to grow. Only then can nothing lead to something.
Meeting new people, reading new books, walking in different places allow serendipity to find you.
Social media addictions while sitting on the same couch day after day give you un-earned hits of dopamine.
Allowing yourself to look stupid, play, and do things that you may not normally do allows creativity to happen.
Telling yourself what you should do, being self flagellating, building an identity on "not being creative" builds gates that prevents beautiful ideas from entering your brain.
Doing nothing is in the depth of the thing. Doing nothing is the openness of the thing. Doing nothing is an act of faith. Ironically, it's the idea that everything is meaningful in of itself not because it's a precursor or an input to some productive output, that ALLOWS you to be creative.
Only when you can take a walk just for the heck of it, instead of talking a walk because "you need to rest your eyes" before you can do more work... will you succeed.
It's a lesson I often forget.
And this point writing is one of the only salves to my human existential wounds and yet I almost never do it
Writing is a laborious, unproductive process...at least it is for me. It requires reading, many walks, many half muttered conversations with loved ones that are desperately trying to wriggle out and escape.
And yet when I do it for long enough something beautiful comes out from the process. Something life affirming. Therapeutic and strong and soothing made just for me. By me.
Or so I think.
But now I believe it’s the tea ceremony not the tea that’s the essential part. The unproductive stuff done to produce is the point. And it requires a certain strange bravery and hope that I find harder and harder to muster in my “always be productive world.”
Still sometimes I feel a strange longing to pick up the pen again. Eventually I do. I pick up a pen and a paper and attempt to sit. I am armed with nothing else. Except maybe a hope and a remembrance that the lack of productivity is just the point.