I’ve gotten a lot of permission to work differently from Maya Angelou, who described an unexpectedly restrictive work environment: “I can’t work in a pretty surrounding. It throws me.”

She — and other spectacularly inventive folks like her — has encouraged me to be a little less tidy with my garage office than I’d otherwise feel was “proper.” (Please, imagine me using air quote fingers as you read the last word of that sentence.) I’m no where near Alexander Calder, whose studio, biographer Jed Perl observed, “…was a sacred dumping ground, from which new inventions emerged in unexpected ways.”

He was clearly aligned with Thomas Edison, who said, “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”

But that said, I do have a love/hate relationship with my deliberately-not-pretty space. It does get a little overwhelming seeing all of those post-its pile up. It’s like I’m the lead in one of those detective whodunits, every available surface covered in conspiracies. If you peeked into my garage, you’d probably think, “I hope he finds the killer…”

For all that, where does the “love” part of the love/hate relationship come from? It comes from unexpected connections!

Case in point: I was recently giving a lecture on the necessity of generating a volume of ideas in effective problem solving. I wanted to make a simple point, and I knew that a human story would help it come alive. But for the love! I couldn’t think of a single story to illustrate the point. I even put a post-it up on my wall that says (present tense, as the post-it is still there, this story notwithstanding), “Look out for an example of a failure of volume!”

I was pacing around the garage, time until the session kick-off ticking away, helplessly racking my brain for a story that I knew I didn’t have. I went to my desk to check the time and, no kidding, looked down at the post-it strewn space below my keyboard to find that there, peeping just beyond the “esc” key on my keyboard, was a post-it referring to the perfect story. I knew it, but I had forgotten it!

Messy workspace for the win! So be like Maya, Edison, and Calder — a good pile of junk rewards those who concern themselves with something deeper than appearances.

(The lecture went well, by the way)

Related: Don’t Clean Up
Related: Keep A Junk Pile
Related: Have Lots of Ideas

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