The following excerpt is from Austin Kleon’s Keep Going, a book that is quickly turning into an absolute treasure.

“Creativity is about connection – you must be connected to others in order to be inspired to share your own work – but it is also about disconnection. You must retreat from the world long enough to think, practice your art, and bring forth something worth sharing with others. You must play a little hide-and-seek in order to produce something worth being found.

Silence and solitude are crucial.”

In my experience, the potency of the internet to annihilate a creative bubble is dangerously great. It seeps in like a virus, seeking to wreck havoc amongst a delicate, creative space. To create something meaningful, disconnection with the world is just as important as connection with the world.

In particular, I’ve found that how I spend the first hour of your day is a pretty good indicator of how the rest of the day will go. If I scroll Facebook as soon as I wake up, my brain becomes ‘primed’ to seek instant gratification activities for the rest of the day. On these days, almost no productive work – and certainly no creative work – gets done at all. The saddest part of it is, there is almost no benefit to checking my devices when upon waking. As Austin puts it,

“There’s almost nothing in the news that any of us need to read in the first hour of the day. When you reach for your phone or your laptop upon waking, you’re immediately inviting anxiety and chaos into your life. You’re also bidding adieu to some of the most potentially fertile moments in the life of a creative person.”

And so the solution to a creative space is to frantically defend your inputs. To find a “bliss station”: a time or place where you can just be alone with yourself and to free yourself from any distractions. For me, that’s the first 30 minutes of the day. I get up, make my bed, drink some water, pee and sit down to journal my morning pages (drinking tea is optional). Devices are absolutely prohibited. This time is defended obsessively, like how I would treat an exam or a job interview. It sounds neurotic but if this bliss station is defended sufficiently, I consistently emerge a better person – both to myself with my work, and to others with being more present.

You can be woke without waking up to the news.

Austin Kleon, Keep Going

With today marking the start of a six-week lockdown, I’ve been thinking about ways to best use the time freed up from no clinical placements or social outings. One question that comes to mind is, “Should I prioritise being productive, or on becoming a better character?” I know it sounds like a strange question – surely the two are mutually related – but what I mean is whether I should focus on my outputs (improving productivity) or my inputs (improving character) with this time.

Growing up, I often fetishised productivity. If I had 100 points to spend on either being productive or being interesting, I’d invest all 100 in being productive. It might’ve been an Asian millennial/Gen Z thing, but spending more time doing the same task always seemed absurd to me. Life is so grand and there is so much to accomplish, why waste your time like that?

Yet, I’m beginning to rethink this notion. It seems that getting stuck in the fast lane comes with a certain level of tunnel-vision – a myopia of sorts. When going fast, it’s so easy to get lost, that one forgets why they even started.  

As usual, literature provided a valuable insight into this dilemma. Thanks to a friend’s recommendation, I’ve recently started reading Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (Norman Denny translation) and found a highlight in my notes that spoke to this idea. In the following excerpt, Victor Hugo describes the garden of the Bishop Myriel. Mme Magloire is the domestic servant to the bishop.

“…The paths enclosed four square plots bordered with box. Mme Magloire once said teasingly to him: ‘Monseigneur, you believe in making use of everything, but this fourth plot is wasted. Salads are more useful than flowers’. ‘You are wrong,’ replied the bishop. ‘The beautiful is as useful as the useful.’ Then, after a pause, he added: ‘More so, perhaps.’”

I found this a great reminder to slow down. To allow one to indulge in something that lets the soul jiggle and delight, despite being useless from a productivity standpoint. For although a flower might not be as nutritious or ‘useful’ as a kale plant, its real value comes from something far deeper and gentler: the splendid ability to light up the heart.

During undergrad, my journals were filled with uplifting phrases such as:

• “Nothing worth having comes easy” (also my phone background for a year)
• “Work hard in the silence, let success be your noise”
• “Be stronger than your strongest excuse”

These ideas served a simple purpose: to motivate. And I must admit, they did their jobs well. When faced with an impossible challenge, I’d often turn to these quotes to boost my willingness to get things done. Without them, activities such as studying under fatigue, training for a marathon or writing when it was hard would’ve taken more effort to complete, more than I might’ve been willing to give.

It seems intuitive that doing more > doing less, which is what productivity is: output per unit of input. But why? Part of the reason is probably cultural, illustrated by the stereotypical Asian kid that unknowingly finds themselves playing Mozart, attending weekend tuition and participating in team sports before the age of seven. To do any less would be wasting time. In addition, ideologies from the Industrial Revolution might’ve fuelled this productivity obsession. 50 units/hour beats 20 units/hr no matter how you look at it, right?

Reasons aside, I sometimes wonder what one can miss in the quest for productivity. There’s a certain short-sightedness – a myopia that comes with getting stuck in the fast lane, for when one moves quickly, the surroundings become a blur. Usually, sights in the periphery are distracting to the highly productive driver’s goal, so ignoring them is fine. But if something important or fantastic pops up outside – say, a crucial warning or a flying turtle – missing such moments can be costly.

It pains me to admit that during my highly neurotic periods, where every hour of my day was planned to optimise for productivity, I ignored many surrounding scenes involving family, relationships and world events. And for what, H1s, running PBs? It’s sadly ironic that in the egocentric pursuit for self-improvement, you risk losing yourself in the process.

Of course, this isn’t to say that high productivity should be eliminated: getting things done is a necessary component of any functioning system. Without those motivational phrases, I might not be writing this today. But I wonder what would happen if us drivers in the fast lane would notice our surroundings more, occasionally moving to the slow lane and even stepping out to observe the complex world around us. Slowing down in an increasingly speedy world – how many great insights could we uncover?

Dear reader, one headline that many are slowing down for is the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet, it’s important to acknowledge that injustices occur all across the world and have been for a long time, before means of extensive media coverage. The issue is greater than what meets the eye. One idea I’d like to put forward is to slow down to a deeper level: one to the point of empathy, for if we suspend our egos and step into another’s world, great acts can occur. So whether you decide to donate to a charity, share your voice on social media or simply read up on other news, please do so with another person in mind.

Learning to stand in somebody else’s shoes, to see through their eyes, that’s how peace begins. And it’s up to you to make that happen. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.

Barack Obama