
Breakthroughs Come From Relaxation  - akandiah
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/lehrer-breakthroughs-come-from-relaxation-H_yfrGZ7SpWXB04vBseIjg.html
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nostrademons
I think it's more accurate to say that breakthroughs come from periods of
intense work & study interspersed with relaxation. If you're _only_ relaxed,
you're basically a slacker, one of those dudes who never gets off the couch.
But if you're only working, you're just a grind. It's when you put them
together - learning everything you can about a topic, or working like crazy to
put something together, and then relaxing and letting your brain process it
all - that you get creativity.

FWIW, the "West Coast work environment" isn't all ping pong and video games
either. It's ping pong and video games interspersed with very hard, intense
sprints where products get built.

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laglad
Order and Disorder. The most productive work comes from riding the border
between the work you planned to do, and the spontaneous moments that draw you
away. Stay glued to the work that you do, and you are likely to miss the big
picture synthesis. Keep getting drawn away, and you'll have no base from which
to explore.

One must put as little order as possible to reach their goal. Too much order
and you are prematurely optimizing the solution. Too little order and you
don't have enough discipline to get to the solution in the first place.

Balance the opposites of order and disorder.

~~~
ak39
Nice.

Much like fertile soil, the mind too needs to lie fallow.

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gpcz
What struck me about the reporters was their insistence on measurability. The
reporter framed the idea as a East/West coast philosophical difference, but I
believe it goes deeper than that. W. Edwards Deming (who brought modern
management to Japanese factories after WWII) listed running a company on only
visible figures as one of his "Seven Deadly Diseases," and he repeatedly
mentioned that the most important factors in running a business are unknown,
unknowable, and unmeasurable.

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jmount
Jacques Hadamard wrote very well on this in his 1945 "An Essay on the
Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field." He described creative
burst happening during recovery phases following intense work. Here is one
link:
[http://archive.org/stream/eassayonthepsych006281mbp#page/n11...](http://archive.org/stream/eassayonthepsych006281mbp#page/n11/mode/2up)

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co_pl_te
I'd venture to make a broader claim. It's not so much that relaxation affords
for higher incidence of creative breakthroughs as it is that relaxation is a
type of activity that supplies the human brain with a steady, stable flow of
blood, and hence, oxygen. Essentially, it's good circulation that gets those
creative juices flowing.

I think if we look at this physiologically, we begin to see a connection
between seemingly incongruous activities that we could all attest to being
potential hotbeds for insight.

Relaxation and meditation are certainly activities that predispose us to
steady breathing, but they are not the only ones. Consider strenuous
activities like exercise and sex. Oftentimes, the breakthroughs here follow
directly after the activity while falling back to a rest state.

Finally, consider periods of sustained intense activity like marathon running.
I have a close friend who runs them regularly who has remarked that she gets
some of her best ideas during her runs. I'd speculate this happens when the
runner's body has adjusted to a certain pace and breathing and blood flow has
stabilized.

Just another angle to look at this, I guess.

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queensnake
Offtopic and down-votable but, I haven't seen anyone as fat as the guy on the
left since moving to the west coast. How nice.

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jpswade
It's important to relax to learn how to reach your full potential.

