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Want to be more creative? Cultivate more laziness.
If you are trying to write, but not getting anywhere, maybe you are just not working hard enough. But maybe the reverse is true. Maybe you are not lazy enough. Maybe you just need to slack off.
I’ve been thinking about the role of laziness in creativity ever since stumbling across Poets’ Jade Splinters. The book is an anthology on the art of writing by the thirteenth century Chinese writer Wei Qingzhi. The passage that really struck me, in Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping’s translation, reads like this:
inspiration enters at the border between hard work and laziness.
In the original Chinese, the text suggests inhabiting these borderlands between hard work and laziness is a skill. My own translation is much less elegant than Barnstone and Ping’s, but brings out this idea of skill more clearly:
the principle by which we awaken to understanding is precisely where we are skilled at being between diligence and idleness
But what is this skill? It may seem like ‘flow’ in psychology, made famous by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is optimal human experience. Famously, it is that sweet spot between boredom and anxiety…
