What is deep work?

Why deep work matters

The three laws of deep work

Deep work isn’t just about work

The underrated skill of daydreaming

The hidden value of exploration, part I

The hidden value of exploration, part II

Why you need to laugh more, part I

Why you need to laugh more, part II

Why you need to take play more seriously

What is deep work

Researchers dating all the way back to the likes of Lev Vygotsky and John Piaget in the late 19th to early 20th Century have always defined creativity as the ability to combine diverse elements in novel, but usable ways.

You know, kind of like an inventor who looks at electricity and sound waves and sees a telephone, or who looks at the telephone and computers and sees the internet, or who looks at the internet and telephones and sees phone apps and… you get the picture.

The point is that what allows an idea to be creative, isn't necessarily its constituent parts – few of those will actually be novel or original anyway – but rather, as with cooking, it's more about the recipe or the method by which those parts are brought together.

Kind of like what Mark Twain once said: "All ideas are secondhand consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources." Meaning that creativity and originality, are what happens when new relationships are found for combining known and seemingly unrelated things.

And this is what academics refer to as 'bisociation'. Now, being more cognitively disinhibited actually allows you to take full advantage of this particular aptitude. It allows for there to be more ingredients in the pot, more potential combinations more, cross-pollination of ideas and thoughts and experiences and perspectives.

Which is why it's such a key attribute of the creative personality. What's really intriguing about it is that this particular temperament or sensibility isn't fixed, it's not necessarily innate. It can be cultivated, developed. It can be trained.

Novel and diverse experiences – everything from the places that you visit, to the people that you surround yourself with, to the activities that you engage in, to the books or the information that you consume and read – all these things have the ability to actually make you more cognitively disinhibited and thereby prime you to be more potentially creative as well.

This is why Dr. Kaufman actually says that "openness to experience is the strongest predictor of creative achievement". Meaning that being open to new ideas and being open to trying new things isn't just the way in which we can develop a more varied or diverse lifestyle. It's actually something that we can do in order to establish a platform by which we can do more effective, more innovative and dynamic work.

Which means that exploration matters way more than what you might think. But you want to know what else might matter more than what you might think? A good sense of humour. 

The hidden value of exploration, part II

What Next?