Amos Tversky said, "The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours." Here are some tactics for productively wasting hours…

One of the greatest challenges on the journey to creative mastery is that the “rules” of creative genius fly in the face of the normal, smart thing to do. Stories from Seinfeld and others encourage me to persist in the wrong direction.

Do you know Claude Shannon? He conceived a little thing called the "bit" (which is also called a "shannon," in his honor) - yeah, that kind of bit. One expert, when pressed to describe his influence on the information age, said, “It’s like saying how much influence the inventor of the alphabet has had on literature." I've been blown away to discover how far ahead of his time he was, and just how unique not only his contributions, but also his methods, were. At just twenty-two years old, he wrote a twenty-five page paper that "would ultimately become known as the most influential master's thesis in history."…

"The secret to doing good (work) is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours."

-Amos Tversky, would-be winner of the Nobel Prize, father of behavioral psychology

To me, the unspoken key to Tversky's sentiment is knowing when to "waste" hours; certainly, not all wasted time is created equal. Sometimes folks dawdle when they should be working. But a deliberate diversion, strategically employed, becomes something much more than a waste: it can usher in a breakthrough. Einstein had his violin. Edison had his naps. Franklin had his Junto. Watson and Crick had their coffee. Tversky and Kahneman had their joke-filled-walks…