I confess that this is not a quote that made it into (there’s already lots of Churchill, anyway):
He boasted to me in the humble-brag way peculiar to British upper-class men that, trying to juggle three jobs, he was unable to do any of them properly. “Because I have no time to do it, I do it in no time,” he said of his Telegraph column. “You just whack it out.”
Good advice from Bill Gates (whose “think week” tradition earns him a place in ):
“Bill Gates once said he liked hiring smart, lazy people because they know how to solve a problem the fastest way,” [Roli Saxena] says. “You can apply that thinking to yourself. If you let yourself be ‘lazy’ enough to only focus on what’s critical during the week, you’ll process what’s left over much more efficiently when it’s time.”
Source: Practical Frameworks for Beating Burnout | First Round Review
“It’s no accident that the best idea I’ve ever had in my life — perhaps maybe the best one I’ll ever have in my life — came to me on vacation,” Miranda said.
“When I picked up Ron Chernow’s biography [of Hamilton], I was at a resort in Mexico on my first vacation from ‘In The Heights,’ which I had been working seven years to bring to Broadway,” he continued. “The moment my brain got a moment’s rest, ‘Hamilton’ walked into it.”
Source: Lin-Manuel Miranda: It’s ‘No Accident’ Hamilton Came To Me On Vacation
[G. K.] Chesterton argued that a man compelled by lack of choice or by social pressure to play golf when he would rather be attending to some solitary hobby was not so different from the slave who might have several hours of leisure while his overseer slept but had to be ready to work at a moment’s notice. Neither could be said to be the master of his leisure. Both had free time but not freedom. To press this parallel further, have we become enslaved by the weekend?
At first glance it is an odd question, for surely it is our work that enslaves us, not our free time. We call people who become obsessed by their jobs workaholics, but we don’t have a word for someone who is possessed by recreation. Maybe we should. I have many acquaintances for whom weekend activities seem more important than workaday existence, and who behave as if the week were merely an irritating interference in their real, extracurricular lives.
The ancient Romans believed in generous vacations: They took sightseeing tours for two to five years at a time. In more recent centuries, Europeans of means and faint constitutions spent multiple months languishing at spas. Even Jesus withdrew for 40 days and 40 nights to find some peace and quiet in the desert. Yet so many of us today — I’m speaking of those fortunate enough to have the resources and the vacation days — remain slavishly attached to our 24/7 connectivity and take only a week at a time, maybe two!, off work.
But it can be difficult on a weeklong vacation to unwind our anxious psyches. Short trips require quickly shaking off travel fatigue so we can hustle through a sightseeing agenda, trying (and usually failing) to wean ourselves off addictive phone and email checking, maximizing every day of good weather, hoping each flight departs on time and that no one gets sick. In all that hurry, there’s little unstructured space to wander and investigate. And without time to spare, wrong turns become sources of squabbles and frustration rather than opportunities for the unexpected.
Source: In Defense of the Three-Week Vacation – The New York Times
Boyd Varty, the South African writer and conservationist, talks about lions and rest in the the latest TED Radio Hour podcast (starts around 26 minutes in):
I grew up spending hours and hours and hours out in nature observing animals. And there is a pace to the natural world, and a genius to the natural world, that arises out of that state of being.
You watch lions lie for 18 hours in deep rest. Just watching them you learn about the power of rest. And then, just as the temperate starts to shift, they feel the change on their body, and out of that deep rest comes an intensity of movement. And so they’re in that rhythm, and they hunt with a ferocity and a focus, and they’re extremely efficient.
But they’re never resting thinking about being efficient, or being really efficient wishing they were resting. They’re always where they are. And that to me is the essence of wisdom really: to be where you are, and to allow action to arise out of that being. That’s the natural world.
Source: “Becoming Wise,” TED Radio Hour (10 June 2016).
It’s a rare thing indeed when something fun also happens to be good for you. Fried food, alcohol, sitting in front of the TV for long stretches at a time — all fun, all not so healthy. But the universe, perhaps as an apology for all the overlap between the things we love and the things that slowly kill us, has thrown humankind one small bone.
Napping, as it turns out, is pretty great for the body and mind, in addition to just being great.
Source: How to Set Yourself Up for the Perfect Nap — Science of Us
I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. (Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness [pdf])
I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work. (Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness [pdf])
From Bertie Forbes, “Recreation,” in Keys to Success: Personal Efficiency (New York: B. C. Forbes, 1918) 222-230.
If you want to accomplish the largest amount of work of which you are capable, you simply must maintain the balance of your mental, nervous, and physical powers. That we call “taking recreation.” Every man needs a different program from every other….
Every one needs fresh air, the slight and nervous quite as much as the muscular person. Next, how do you get nervous relaxation? Is your work physical so that you need mental relief? Or is it mental, so that you need physical and social? Are you getting enough social relief? Or are you getting too much? Too much and too little are equally bad.
If you need social relief and do not have congenial friends, what shall you do? Go to the theatre. Go to church. Join a club. Anybody can join an improvement club, to work for others, and in working for others you will certainly get just the social relief you need and you will be astonished at how much you will enjoy the work.If you need mental relief, join a study club or a study class, or take a correspondence course.
If you see people too much, shut yourself up quietly three evenings every week and read a good book. Or would spending the time teaching and entertaining your children, or younger brothers and sisters two or three evenings a week give you the relief you need?
Write down each one of these heads, and opposite it write a single sentence summarizing your situation and needs in regard to it. Life is a complicated thing, and you can’t possibly tell where you stand unless you set down every point and decide on that point by itself where you stand, and then later balance up all of the different points as a separate, final mental operation.
Enjoyment comes in the highest degree not from going out to seek “fun” and trying to chop it out of life with an axe, so to speak, but in calmly studying your mental and nervous and physical nature and deciding what parts are underfed, what parts overfed, so that you can deliberately find employment for the neglected parts.
Doing those things will give you more real pleasure than you ever had before in your life, whether people ordinarily would call what you do recreation or work. Digging a ditch is the finest kind of recreation for one man, and studying Herbert Spencer’s “First Principles” for another. The theatre, church, the club, and sport of course suit the big majority.
Just what, now, should your personal program be? Write it out.
The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul© 2018 Deliberate Rest
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