Maya Angelou once said, “I can’t work in a pretty surrounding. It throws me.”

I agree. But that said, I’d like to make the case for tidying up every now and then. This is a spin on “clean up,” but it’s deeper than that. For one, I find it difficult to say something exactly opposite of what I’ve said before. I stand by not cleaning up as the normal rule of a creative space. But occasionally, it helps to dig through the junk pile.

The reality is, the junk pile is valuable precisely because you rummage through it from time to time. After all, it’s the rummaging that Edison and Picasso were so good at. If it’s just piling up, gathering dust, it’s not useful. Digging is a way to trigger the enviable phenomenon that legendary Stanford professor Jim March called “simultaneous arrivals.”

As Flaubert said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

If you can’t stand the sight of a junk pile — and I get it: it pains me to look at all the post-it’s I’ve got lying around — then at the very least, make a commitment to read through old notes. Steven Johnson describes Charles Darwin’s practice in the fantastic Where Good Ideas Come From, “Darwin was constantly re-reading his notes, discovering new implications. His ideas emerge as a kind of duet between the present-tense thinking brain and all those past observations recorded on paper… He adhered to a rigorous practice of maintaining notebooks where he quoted other sources, and provides new ideas, interrogated and dismissed false leads, drew diagrams, and generally let his mind roam on the page.”

There’s a great deal of merit to the claim that our “present-tense thinking brains” derive incremental value from reviewing past observations. If writing is remembering, then reading isn’t simply re-remembering. It’s learning anew.

Related: Don’t Clean Up
Related: Keep A Junk Pile
Related: Reviewing Old Notes
Related: Put Learning to Use

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