And, in different ways, their lives offer an entrée into the question of how labor, rest, and creativity connect.įirst, imagine a silent, cloaked figure walking home on a dirt path winding through the countryside. Conveniently, they were next-door neighbors and friends who lived in the village of Downe, southeast of London. They were both very accomplished in their fields. Let’s start by looking at the lives of two figures. The National Archives and Records Administration If some of history’s greatest figures didn’t put in immensely long hours, maybe the key to unlocking the secret of their creativity lies in understanding not just how they labored but how they rested, and how the two relate. How did they manage to be so accomplished? Can a generation raised to believe that 80-hour workweeks are necessary for success learn something from the lives of the people who laid the foundations of chaos theory and topology or wrote Great Expectations? Their towering creative achievements result from modest “working” hours. Their creativity and productivity, in other words, were not the result of endless hours of toil. The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking. Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work. When you examine the lives of history’s most creative figures, you are immediately confronted with a paradox: They organize their lives around their work, but not their days.įigures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus.
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