Tomorrow I’ll be addressing teachers and my talk is on ‘Fostering Creativity and Imagination,’ “What’s a gift we all have received but we most dislike?” I’m going to ask, and then will tell them, ”it’s the gift of boredom.”
Then I’m going to go a step farther, “If you feel bored with my talk, don’t touch your phone, because the time you are going to daydream could produce great results!”
Many years ago, my daughter joined an advertising firm, and a few days later I asked her how she liked the job. She replied she quite liked it, but could not understand why she was not paid as much as some employees who looked bored and spent their time looking out of the window.
“They are the copywriters,” I told her, “And, any brilliant idea they produce could be a turning point for any brand they are working on!”
Brilliance out of boredom!
But to make your millions out of boredom, and to allow creativity and our imagination to work, we need to harness boredom. And harnessing boredom, is only by allowing our minds to wander and by not giving it anything to feed on.
Because today as soon as the mind is bored, we feed it on social media.
Instead of allowing our mind to innovate, to create something new, design something unheard of, discover a fresh idea, we put a stopper to our mind, and dam the rushing river of creativity and imagination by plugging it with social media.
Even a book empowers our mind to move into a world of imagination.
But what happens when we pick up our phone out of boredom?
We move into the world of ‘search’. Many years ago, I’d taken a friend to a housewarming, and after the ceremony, the owner asked me if I’d come along to visit a neighbour who wasn’t well. I left the friend who’d come with me along with two other youngsters in front of a TV, and came back an hour later. “How was the TV show?” I asked my friend.
“They just went from one channel to another, and we spent our time searching!” he told me exasperatedly.
And that’s exactly what we do with our phone. To satiate our boredom, we ‘search’ and continue doing so, looking for that all evasive something that will satiate our boredom, but all that happens after an hour is a feeling of emptiness.
Don’t cork your mind. Instead, allow it to creatively wander. Something, I tell would-be writers in my writing class, is to allow the mind to think out the full story or play or novel, before touching the pen or laptop keyboard.
Edison closed his eyes, others had other methods, maybe the same, but whether it was Mozart, Shakespeare or Bill Gates they all harnessed boredom, produced brilliance, and some even became billionaires..!
Robert Clements is a newspaper columnist and author. He blogs at www.bobsbanter.com and can be reached at bobsbanter@gmail.com
