Dirty Your Hands With A Hobby

“One thing I always did was gardening. It’s meditative and creative. It frees your brain, and you’re problem solving: what plants do well here? You kill a lot of plants in the process. But you’re creating a look, and every season, the look changes, so there’s always an opportunity to try new things.”

Perry and I were talking with our good friend and mentor, Claudia Kotchka. She’s a legendary leader of innovation, and one of our favorite collaborators. We were asking about regular disciplines that fueled her creative practice while leading design innovation and marketing over a 30-year career at Procter & Gamble. The masters of creativity are almost always exceptionally thoughtful about their daily rituals.

“There’s something about having your hands in the dirt that keeps you grounded,” Claudia says. “Pulling weeds is the best. You’re not really thinking about work per se, but ideas start to flow. People say they get their best ideas in the shower. I got mine in the garden.”

I couldn’t help but remember Mervin Kelly, the long-celebrated President of Bell Labs (if you’re unfamiliar with Kelly and his legacy, just read this touching memoir written by John Pierce, inventor of satellite communication, which was shared at a rare, special ceremony of the National Academy of Sciences to memorialize his passing). In The Idea Factory (one of the most oft-referenced books from my extensive and ever-expanding reading list), there’s an entire section dedicated to Kelly’s passion for gardening:

“Every morning, at 5 AM, Kelly would rise and dress and make his way down the stairs of his big Dutch colonial house and out into the backyard toward the garden. (His house was among the more modest of the neighborhood, but) it was his backyard gardens — ornate, multi tiered, shrieking with color – that might be called extravagant. They were a private indulgence. Each year Kelly supervised the arrangement of tens of thousands of tulip and daffodil bulbs, some of which he ordered from Holland — “1,000 bulbs every year just to keep it going,” his wife recalled — but most of which he would store during the winter in the corners of a basement room, secreted under piles of sand and sorted according to a complex color classification system of his own devising. For a hobby, it was almost absurd in its meticulousness. Then again, this was Kelly. In the yard he would turn the dirt himself, impatiently, before the gardeners arrived, working methodically in the cool near-dark.”

I’m not advocating gardening exactly, obviously. But rather the notion of having a “go-to diversion.” Even Einstein had one! Joyce Carol Oates runs up the same (actual) hill when she’s stuck. Where’s your hill? Where’s your garden?

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