Why Slacking Off Pays Off . . .

I’ve long been a proponent of the phrase “less is more,” which I find applicable in situations too numerous to count.

And now I’ve found a new application for the phrase.

Turns out that LESS work often results in MORE creative output.

Don’t believe me?

Check out this article ~ Darwin Was A Slacker And You Should Be Too

From the article:

Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus.

Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work. The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking.

Their creativity and productivity, in other words, were not the result of endless hours of toil. Their towering creative achievements result from modest “working” hours.

From writing to research, from science to music, from athletics to art, top performers benefit from deliberate practice followed by deliberate rest and downtime.

World-class performance doesn’t come after 10,000 hours of practice, as Malcolm Gladwell claimed:

“It comes after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, 12,500 hours of deliberate rest, and 30,000 hours of sleep.”

Aah . . . that’s better!

The cited and linked article is excerpted from Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang