Maximize Your Down Time

I talk with lots of young folks considering an entrepreneurial path “someday.” One thing I constantly remind them: Don’t waste your free time! Amidst the frenzied pace of life, it’s tempting to just veg out whenever there’s a down moment. “Doomscrolling” is real! Instead of whittling away the hours, creative geniuses make good use of found time.

As Walter Isaacson recounts in his fantastic biography, “Albert Einstein spent the most creative seven years of his life arriving at work at 8 a.m., six days a week, and examining patent applications… He learned that he could work on the patent applications so quickly that it left time for him to sneak in his own scientific thinking during the day. ‘I was able to do a full day’s working only two or three hours,’ he recalled. ‘The remaining part of the day, I would work out my own ideas.’”

In the same way, Marc Randolph describes what jump-started his habit of idea exploration in That Will Never Work, “I had, somewhat unexpectedly, quite a bit of time on my hands.” Because of an unexpected merger, he found himself and his team were deemed “redundant. For the next four months or so, while the feds went over the paperwork, we had to come to work every day. We were still getting paid, but we had nothing — and I mean nothing — to do.”

Randolph admits that he started killing time absorbed in athletic pursuits — spending hours at the driving range, trying to get better at golf — but that didn’t satiate him. “What I needed was the feeling of being deeply engaged with a project. What I needed was purpose. Hence the ideas for a new company.”

It’s no coincidence that both Einstein and Randolph struck gold when they were underemployed. As Amos Tversky once quipped, “You waste years when you can’t afford to waste hours.” But it’s not automatic; you’ve got to decide to maximize the time instead of letting it slip away.

Wes Pendleton actually acquired his knack for making time for learning through an unexpected discovery of the virtues of found time: “I really started to block that time out back in 2016. I had walked away from everything. I was just like, I can't do this anymore. I went and got a regular job. I was working at Best Buy for six months or something like that. It was the best thing ever. I wasn't making any money, but to be able to go to work and not have to think about what I'm going to do when I go to work. I just showed up… I literally would have air pods in and I would literally just stand in the middle of the floor and listen to podcasts for hours. Just listening and listening and listening. I would listen to audiobooks. It was the best thing that happened to me, because one thing I did learn about myself through that is, where I get the most clarity is when I actually take a break and take a step back.” (from P&P podcast, season 2, episode 3)

Related: Make Exploring A Habit
Related: Make Time To Learn
Related: The Paint & Pipette Podcast Presents: Wes Pendleton

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