There are tons of articles and blog posts and books and videos on how to get better ideas and be more productive. While all of them will give you suggestions, they are not foolproof. So if a writer says they get their best ideas in nature, you blindly following suit might not result in a novel.
One question that has haunted mankind and will continue to haunt mankind is this — where do great ideas come from? A corollary to this is how do some people manage to be infinitely more productive than others.
Even people who are considered creatives, inventors, revolutionaries — none of them can answer either question in a straightforward manner. That’s because there really is no fixed answer. After all these years, I still haven’t been able to pinpoint how I have got some of the ideas that have struck me, mostly when I wasn’t thinking about them.
There are tons of articles and blog posts and books and videos on how to get better ideas and be more productive. While all of them will give you suggestions, they are not foolproof. So if a writer says they get their best ideas in nature, you blindly following suit might not result in a novel.
It’s easy to fall for a new app that promises to help you improve your concentration, a new productivity method that allows you to finish work earlier, expensive noise cancelation headphones that put you in a state of pure bliss and allow you to finish the presentation that you have been sitting on for decades.
All of these work to some extent. But none of them make you get better ideas or make you more productive.
In broad terms, serendipity is finding something when you’re not actively looking for it, sort of an unplanned discovery.
To me, that is closest I can come to do discover the creative process — it’s serendipitous. Which is one reason why it is so hard to explain to someone and why it’s so hard to create situations that supposedly inspire it.
Here’s how it works most of the times — you are consciously, or sub-consciously, thinking deeply of something when the answer or solution comes to you.
This is what most people lack — something to deeply ponder about. Note, I am not using the word passion because that's just another excuse to not think deeply about something. “I’m not passionate about anything hence I scroll all day to find inspiration.”
Then, what are the enemies of serendipity? For starters, technological distractions and open-plan offices.
When you are constantly getting distracted, there is no way you can think deeply about something. In fact, constant distraction means escaping from the problem at hand.
In a meeting, when people pull out their phones or are peering into one, I know for a fact that it’s a pointless meeting. When no one is even half-engaged, leave alone being fully engaged, it’s a waste of everyone’s time. The same also applies to personal productivity. If you’re looking into your phone every five minutes, someone who has out their phone on silent can do thrice the work that you are doing and do a much better job — a point worth pondering over for all organizations, even the so-called social media management ones.
Here are some examples of serendipity:
A chef comes up with an idea for a new dish when they are in the middle of making something else.
A comic comes up with a great line when they doing a last-minute rehearsal.
A writer rewrites the entire piece on a whim after going for a restroom break.
A player plays a breathtaking shot when the game is on the line (Federer-Nadal battles anyone?)
We see the best parts, forgretting that someone was immersed in whatever it is they were doing, before magic found them.
Look back at some of the best discoveries and inventions — most of them had an element of serendipity. None of them can be classified as flukes.
All the productivity apps, the spreadsheets, the timesheets, none of them make you more productive. They can tell you how much time you have spent looking at a screen, block certain websites, beep when you spend too much time on a site — but they can’t make you do the actual work. Similar to leading a horse to the water and not being able to force it to drink.
The best productivity hack ever— find something to be serendipitous about.
P.S. A couple of productivity apps that have caught my eye (it goes without saying that they work when you get down to doing the work)
Go fucking work allows you to block sites that you constantly visit. There are many others like it minus the expletives, but this really caught my eye for obvious reasons. Other alternatives are self-control and focusme.
On the play store, search for indistractible launcher. It’s a killer app that basically cleans out your screen, making it hard for you to access your apps.
Read Atomic Habits author James Clear’s post on productivity.
