Disciplined Daydreaming

The gist of the origin of the Post-It Note, is that a 3M engineer found himself daydreaming during a particularly boring sermon and, by making an unexpected connection between a seemingly-irrelevant technology and an irritating private-life annoyance, stumbled across one of the most widely adopted new product innovations of the last 50 years.

As it turns out, apparently there's an empirical foundation for the daydream-to-insight loop.

"Jonathan Schooler, the psychologist who helped pioneer the study of insight, has recently begun studying the benefits of daydreams. His lab has demonstrated that people who consistently engage in more daydreaming score significantly higher on measures of creativity..."

So what are the implications for Schooler? He has codified his insights on insight into his daily routines:

"Schooler has begun applying this research to his own life: he now takes a dedicated daydreaming walk every day... 'This is where I come to relax, but just because I'm relaxed doesn't mean I'm not working. What I realized is that the kind of thinking I do here [on the hike] is so useful that I needed to build it into my work routine. It wasn't enough to just daydream in my spare moments, while sitting in traffic or waiting in line. I needed to be more disciplined about my mind-wandering.'"

(From "Imagine")

"Disciplined mind wandering" is such a counter-intuitive tactic. One remembers how Einstein engaged some of his most breakthrough thinking while conducting thought experiments, sitting on a stool in the Swiss Patent Office for 8 hours a day... but I wonder, how many have come to that same realization, that we need to be more disciplined about our mind-wandering, to the extent that we wield disciplined day dreaming as an important tactic in our creative toolkit?

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