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.” 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.”

Both Angelou and Calder are 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… or a therapist!”

For all that, where does the “love” half of my 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 of me, I couldn’t think of a single story to illustrate the point. I even put a post-it up on my wall that said, “Look out for an example of a failure of volume / insufficient idea generation.”

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!

Don’t be afraid to be like Maya, Edison, and Calder — a good pile of junk rewards those who concern themselves with something deeper than appearances.

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

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