The Power of a Regular Reset
Today I’m turning me off and on again
It’s a busy old world we live in. We’re all busy. We have to be, don’t we? If we want to get ahead. Laziness and ambition are incompatible. Or are they?
As Tom Kreider once happily claimed:
“I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know.”
As a writer, Kreider firmly believes that creativity is far more compatible with laziness than busyness, and I tend to agree. I’m a working freelance writer with about ten income streams. I’m pretty productive when it comes to researching, writing, editing, submitting. But when I start to feel myself really slowing down, I don’t speed up. I stop.
Stopping is what’s needed when you’re running out of steam: stopping, resting, resetting, recovering. As human beings, as with so much else, it’s sometimes necessary to turn off, wait a while, then reboot. It’s not always necessary to know exactly what the glitch was. A reset can get rid of undiagnosed issues, often much quicker than trying to analyse them.
Quoted in Cal Newport’s book Deep Work, Kreider claims:
“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body. And deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as…
