Breakthroughs Come From Relaxation | Hacker News Reader

Breakthroughs Come From Relaxation

bloomberg.com

60 pointsakandiah10 comments

I think it's more accurate to say that breakthroughs come from periods of intense work & study interspersed with relaxation. If you're only relaxed, you're basically a slacker, one of those dudes who never gets off the couch. But if you're only working, you're just a grind. It's when you put them together - learning everything you can about a topic, or working like crazy to put something together, and then relaxing and letting your brain process it all - that you get creativity.

FWIW, the "West Coast work environment" isn't all ping pong and video games either. It's ping pong and video games interspersed with very hard, intense sprints where products get built.

Relaxation means to be free of stress. A couch potato can be on as much adrenaline as a hard working person. We only know a single state which is state of constant stimulus and excitation. Relaxation is a state of similar to meditation. You don't call Buddha a slacker; do you?

Order and Disorder. The most productive work comes from riding the border between the work you planned to do, and the spontaneous moments that draw you away. Stay glued to the work that you do, and you are likely to miss the big picture synthesis. Keep getting drawn away, and you'll have no base from which to explore.

One must put as little order as possible to reach their goal. Too much order and you are prematurely optimizing the solution. Too little order and you don't have enough discipline to get to the solution in the first place.

Balance the opposites of order and disorder.

Nice.

Much like fertile soil, the mind too needs to lie fallow.

Agreed. That's something I love about free-lancing and working on my own projects. I can fine-tune the working/relaxing balance to a value that's nearly optimal.

What struck me about the reporters was their insistence on measurability. The reporter framed the idea as a East/West coast philosophical difference, but I believe it goes deeper than that. W. Edwards Deming (who brought modern management to Japanese factories after WWII) listed running a company on only visible figures as one of his "Seven Deadly Diseases," and he repeatedly mentioned that the most important factors in running a business are unknown, unknowable, and unmeasurable.

Jacques Hadamard wrote very well on this in his 1945 "An Essay on the Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field." He described creative burst happening during recovery phases following intense work. Here is one link: http://archive.org/stream/eassayonthepsych006281mbp#page/n11...

I'd venture to make a broader claim. It's not so much that relaxation affords for higher incidence of creative breakthroughs as it is that relaxation is a type of activity that supplies the human brain with a steady, stable flow of blood, and hence, oxygen. Essentially, it's good circulation that gets those creative juices flowing.

I think if we look at this physiologically, we begin to see a connection between seemingly incongruous activities that we could all attest to being potential hotbeds for insight.

Relaxation and meditation are certainly activities that predispose us to steady breathing, but they are not the only ones. Consider strenuous activities like exercise and sex. Oftentimes, the breakthroughs here follow directly after the activity while falling back to a rest state.

Finally, consider periods of sustained intense activity like marathon running. I have a close friend who runs them regularly who has remarked that she gets some of her best ideas during her runs. I'd speculate this happens when the runner's body has adjusted to a certain pace and breathing and blood flow has stabilized.

Just another angle to look at this, I guess.

Offtopic and down-votable but, I haven't seen anyone as fat as the guy on the left since moving to the west coast. How nice.

It's important to relax to learn how to reach your full potential.

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