Put Up With The Mess
I’ve gotten a lot of permission to work differently from Maya Angelou, who described an unexpectedly restrictive work environment: “I can’t work in a pretty surrounding. It throws me.”
She — and other spectacularly inventive folks like her — has encouraged me to be a little less tidy with my garage office than I’d otherwise feel was “proper.” I’m no where near Alexander Calder, whose studio, biographer Jed Perl observed, “…was a sacred dumping ground, from which new inventions emerged in unexpected ways.”
Both Angelou and Calder are clearly aligned with Thomas Edison, who said, “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”
But that said, I do have a love/hate relationship with my deliberately-not-pretty space. It does get a little overwhelming seeing all of those post-its pile up. It’s like I’m the lead in one of those detective whodunits: every available surface covered in conspiracies. If you peeked into my garage, you’d probably think, “I hope he finds the killer… or a therapist!”
For all that, where does the “love” half of my love/hate relationship come from? It comes from unexpected connections!
Case in point: I was recently giving a lecture on the necessity of generating a volume of ideas in effective problem solving. I wanted to make a simple point, and I knew that a human story would help it come alive. But for the love of me, I couldn’t think of a single story to illustrate the point. I even put a post-it up on my wall that said, “Look out for an example of a failure of volume / insufficient idea generation.”
I was pacing around the garage, time until the session kick-off ticking away, helplessly racking my brain for a story that I knew I didn’t have. I went to my desk to check the time and, no kidding, looked down at the post-it strewn space below my keyboard to find that there, peeping just beyond the “esc” key on my keyboard, was a post-it referring to the perfect story.
I knew it, but I had forgotten it! Messy workspace for the win!
Don’t be afraid to be like Maya, Edison, and Calder — a good pile of junk rewards those who concern themselves with something deeper than appearances.
Related: Don’t Clean Up
Related: Keep A Junk Pile
Related: Have Lots of Ideas
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The fine folks over at Section recently interviewed me about some common mistakes I’m seeing folks make when they use AI. One of the biggest ones? The tendency to expect too little, and get just that.