Jeff Carreira: Hello Alex, thank you for speaking with me about your book Rest: Why You Get More Done When you Work Less. To start our conversation, can you speak about why you wrote this book in the first place?

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang: Partly, it came out of my own experience, both in a negative and a positive sense. The negative was that I had worked as a technology forecaster and futurist consultant in Silicon Valley for a number of years. The work is very interesting and engaging, but never finished. You're always half a project behind. After doing this for a while, I had my own experience of risking burnout, and I was lucky enough to have a sabbatical at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, where I went and did the work on my first Trade Press book on technological distraction. While I was there I had an epiphany. I was getting a lot done and having great ideas, but I didn't feel the time pressure that is just part of life in Silicon Valley. It made me think that maybe our assumptions about the necessity of overwork and success coming from packing more and more things into your schedule was actually incorrect, and maybe even backwards.

I wasn’t able to pursue the idea seriously for a little while, but when I did get into it there were two things that made me realize there was a real story there. First, I was looking at the biographies and the daily routines of highly creative, accomplished people. People like Nobel Prize winners, famous composers, writers, folks of unquestionable accomplishment. It turned out that most of them labored far fewer hours than we would think are necessary to do really good work. They tended to organize their days in consistent ways, layering periods of highly focused work with periods of breaks, long walks, time in the garden, et cetera. The second thing was that there emerged a body of work in neuroscience and the psychology of creativity that helped explain why these work patterns would help people have better ideas, better health, and more sustainable, creative lives. Those two things convinced me that there was a story to be told.

Jeff Carreira: I enjoyed the book and found the anecdotes about highly creative people fascinating, and you also present the findings of a great deal of scientific research. Was there anything you discovered in researching the book that surprised you?

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang: There were a couple of things that really jumped out at me, as someone who worked in a field where overwork is seen as not just as a badge of honor, but necessary for success. Where lots of famous people talk about working fantastically long hours. Think of your startup founders living in the laboratory or the garage. Then I started learning about people like Charles Darwin or Stephen King, who would only do what we regard as work for about four or five hours a day. That was a real revelation, and it seemed that there was good reason to think that there was an upper limit to how long most of us are able to work in a concentrated way.

Another thing that struck me was the discovery that there is a skill dimension to rest – that rest isn't just leisure or a state of physiological passivity. It turns out that the most restorative kinds of rest are active rather than passive, things like exercise, walks, working in the garden. It seems that rest is something you can actually get better at, that people take time to settle on routines that allow them physical and mental recovery, while also nudging them to be more creative.

Jeff Carreira: Your book gave me permission and clarity for some of my own work habits. One of the things that hit me at the very beginning of the book was a neuroscientist from a century ago, who said the great challenge that science will face in the future will be the amount of work and the speed of work that will be expected. He spoke about the increased need for fast publishing that would force scientists to ask superficial questions rather than deep ones, because they just won’t have time for depth.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang: That's Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a neuroscientist who did some of the fundamental work on the neural structure and early techniques for cell staining to see how the brain works, and how neurons form and develop. He was writing at a time when our modern system of science and research was starting to fall in love with quantity. He was beginning to see how the number of publications a scientist produced was becoming a proxy for quality. He was also living through a period in which there was a lot more data being created, and scientists had to figure out how to deal with it all. All that analytical work threatened to drown out opportunities for more serious thinking. I think that this is exactly the situation that we face today.

Jeff Carreira: There's a Gertrude Stein quote I love and which you may know. She said, “It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.” I relate that quote to one of the main premises of your book, and I wanted to ask you, why does it take a lot of time doing nothing to be a genius?

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang: Because there's an awful lot going on under the hood that often we're not really conscious of when we are apparently doing nothing. Scientists have looked at our minds when we are apparently inactive, spacing out, and thinking about nothing at all. Our minds in these states look almost as active as they do when we're concentrating hard on something, like working on our taxes or having a really intense conversation. But the parts of the brain that light up in these two states are somewhat different. The more passive states tend to link together parts of the brain that are associated with creative thinking and visualization, and that like to work on unsolved problems that we haven't been able to deal with through conscious effort.

When you have that experience where you're trying to, for example, remember the name of the musician who was in that band and also did that solo project. It's on the tip of your tongue, and then a few minutes later you remember it was Graham Parsons. That's the default mode network working on a problem, and that same network becomes active when we rest and our conscious attention has moved somewhere else. One of the things that happens when we are doing nothing is that part of our creative minds have an opportunity to operate in ways they generally do not when focused or working in a more analytical way. Very accomplished creatives come to realize what a powerful mechanism for discovery and insight these states are. I believe it was Ernst Mach who said that the subconscious mind was a better mathematician than he was, because it was able to find answers to problems that he could not, no matter how long he worked on them. The kinds of daily routines that highly creative people come up with, and their investment in hobbies or time spent on vacations, reflects an understanding that this is actually the time when the hard to control, but still creative part of their minds can do their thing. I think that's what your Gertrude Stein quote points to.

Jeff Carreira: I want to relate what you've just been talking about to another important part of your book. You discuss the stages of creativity articulated by Graham Wallace, which include preparation, to incubation, to inspiration, and finally to elaboration. Could you tell us a little bit about Graham Wallace and his ideas?

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang: Wallace is one of these figures whose work is everywhere, even though he himself has largely been forgotten. His four-stage model is articulated in a 1926 book called The Art of Thought, which was written partly as Wallace's attempt to help better understand the psychology of creativity in the wake of World War I. He felt that the Great War was in part a failure of imagination to come up with solutions to difficult diplomatic problems. He felt that one contribution he could make was to help us all better understand how creative processes work, so we could use them to solve problems and build a better world.

Looking back again at the careers of poets and writers through their memoirs and writings, he argued that their work follows four stages. There's the initial stage, which is all the visible, conscious activity stuff, which he called the preparation. If you think of this as an iceberg, the preparation is all the stuff that's above water. And then the second phase called incubation occurs when you set the problem aside, and you let your subconscious mind work on the rest of it. This is the phase where ideas are percolating in the back of your mind, even while you're working on something else. The third phase, illumination, tends to be sudden. It's that striking moment where you see a new way to solve a problem, where the answer seems to come in a flash after months or sometimes years of preparation and incubation. Then the final phase, elaboration, is basically when you verify and make sure the insight will work.

Wallace argued that this process is something you see in both big ideas and in smaller ones. This model has turned out to be very robust, because it's relatively simple. So people can build on and elaborate on it, and at the same time it's a model that all of us recognize. We can see parts of our own problem solving in that model. It's a model that continues to be invoked and used by scientists, even though Wallace himself is often not remembered. Even in the institution that he co-founded, the London School of Economics, he is not memorialized with a Wallace building, but with just a single seminar room. But the important thing is that his big idea lives on.

Jeff Carreira: I want to relate your book to a couple of aspects of my own experience. I teach meditation, and I’ve also written quite a few books. When I'm working on a book I devote mornings to it, usually until about eleven o-clock. I'll wake up, start writing at six or seven AM, and keep going as long as there's flow. Then I'll get to a place where I'm done, and I'll go for a walk. I walk and things get worked out as I'm walking. Maybe that's the end for the day, or maybe I get re-inspired and I sit back down to write more. But one way or another, I'm generally done by about eleven. When I read your book it gave me permission for this way of working. I had read other books that emphasized writing much more everyday, but I never felt that I could. Your book showed me that it is not only okay to write for shorter amounts of time, but I'm in the company of some excellent writers in doing that.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang: This is really illuminating, partly because I would have thought that after writing so many books that you would trust your process and you could relax knowing that you had figured out something that really does work for you. It is very much the case that many highly creative and very successful writers get up early in the morning, they write for about four or five hours, and then that's it – they're done for the day. People like Stephen King or Toni Morrison, and many others. It's a very, very long list. I think it's important to respect the fact that you can get an awful lot of good work done in those periods when you're in flow, and that once you fall out of flow your ability to maintain that level of excellence will fall off. The smarter thing to do is to take some time to rest so that the next day you can get back into it. But it's easy given everything we’re taught about how we ought to work to imagine that this is wrong, when in fact, in the long run, this is a very smart strategy.

Jeff Carreira: Well, it has been working for me, so I'm going to stick with it. But now I have the science behind it. The other part of my world is teaching meditation. I came from a school of meditation which essentially promoted the idea that the more meditation you did, the better. When we were on retreat, we would meditate from early in the morning until late at night, and sometimes we'd keep going into the early morning hours. There was a sense that the people who were meditating the most were the most serious and the most dedicated and getting the most out of it. But looking back at my own experience I often found that it wasn't always in meditation that I had the biggest insights and the most life-transforming realization. Sometimes it was in the time between meditations, just walking around, when the big insights came. For this reason, when I teach I tell people to be very focused on the meditation instruction for the practice, and really give yourself to that. But when you are not meditating, don’t worry about anything. Don't be busy working things out outside of the practice, just be easy and free. Go for a walk, or just sit and relax. Intuitively, I felt that rest was necessary to let insights bubble up to the surface. Your book wasn't specifically about meditation, but I felt that the experience I've had in that domain fits well into some of the ideas that you presented.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang: That's really interesting because very often we think of a wandering mind as not just the opposite of being focused or contemplative or meditative, but as a bad thing, as an inhibition. If paying attention to the present moment is good, letting your mind wander is the opposite, and is therefore not good. While contemplative practices have enormous value to them, there is a lot to be said for recognizing that there is also profound value in allowing your mind to do apparently nothing at all, in much the same way that resting after a workout has value. Coaches talk about how you don't build muscle when you're working out. You build muscle the night after your workout because that's when you're sleeping and your body is recovering and has time to actually create more muscle cells. I think that, particularly in an era where smartphones offer a constant source of distraction, we risk losing appreciation for the value of downtime. It's great that you were able to see that relaxation from practice was a complement rather than a distraction or a negation to meditation.

Jeff Carreira: Yes, I feel like I will bring more of the insights from your book into my retreats from now on. I'm going to finish with one last thing that I was very inspired by in your book, which came right at the end. It is about taking periods of time off. The examples you gave of people taking sabbaticals from their work was inspiring to me, because from time to time I’ve thought about the possibility of something like that. I would love to hear you speak a little bit about the examples you mention in the book, and the whole idea that sometimes taking a significant chunk of time off and shutting things down ends up being the best thing to do.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang: One of the people I mentioned was the designer Stefan Sagmeister, who would take one year off every seven years. He is a designer that most of the world doesn't know, but whose work the entire world has seen. He's done advertisements, album covers, and things like that. So no matter where you are, you've encountered something of his work. In the book I mention a Spanish chef, Adria, who would close his restaurant for six months out of the year. He was one of the creators of molecular gastronomy and the modern movement of fine dining. Not the French model, or doing the perfect Japanese meal, but a highly experimental, surprising model that worked with new kinds of instruments to present food in entirely new ways. It is a style of cooking that requires an awful lot of imagination and experimentation. You can imagine both of these people being like elite athletes in the sense that not many of us have the resources to take an entire year off, or six months out of the year. But just as I will never be able to play basketball as well as LeBron James, I can still learn a lot about the game from him.

I think the examples of people who take these kinds of sabbaticals teach us that even relatively short breaks, if we design them thoughtfully, can be life-changing. If you look at Sagmeister, for example, he didn't take any work with him. There were no commercial projects that he carried into his sabbatical and completed on the side. Being able to make that mental break from your ordinary life is an important thing. That means you're not advising students, or doing your regular business. You really are in the moment of the sabbatical.

Another important thing is to get away, but not too far away. Sagmeister would go to Bali or some other place quite different from New York City, where his studio is based, but not somewhere that would require him to learn a completely different language or spend a lot of time figuring out how to get along in the new environment. There's a study of fashion designers who work abroad that found that spending time in another culture made them more creative for a while, but that there's a sweet spot where you're in a place that is different in a way that's stimulating, but doesn't require too much from you. I think the research tells us that even sabbaticals of just a couple of weeks, if you're able to really detach from your regular job and go to a place that is different and stimulating, but not too alien, even those can provide you with new ideas that can unlock your mind and get your creative juices flowing in a way that can pay off for years. I think if you're able to do it, then it is a super valuable thing.

Jeff Carreira: Thank you very much Alex. I loved your book and I am looking forward to putting more of its ideas into action in my life.