THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Today we’re going to dive deep on why restorative naps, long walks, vigorous exercise and lengthy vacations all help creative people do their best work. My guest today is an expert on how rest plays a key role in creativity. He’s the author of “Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less”. As well as the founder of The Restful Company and a visiting scholar at Stanford University.
His book Rest is about the hidden role that rest plays in the lives of successful artists, musicians, writers, scientists, and thought-leaders. Drawing on Neuroscience, Psychology, and History, his research demonstrates that many accomplished people use “rest” in ways that help them be more creative. And that we can understand why their practices work and adapt them to our own busy lives. Please, welcome to the show, Dr Alex Pang.
Miriam Schulman:
Welcome Alex, I’m so thrilled that you’ve decided to join us here today.
Alex Pang:
Well, thanks Miriam, it’s a pleasure to be with you.
Miriam Schulman:
First of all, I have a ton of questions. I’m really happy that this book came out. It actually helped reaffirm me as a mother because previously I live in a very competitive town in the backyard of New York. I’m sure you can relate in there’s plenty of competitive towns in California where you live.
Alex Pang:
Oh, yeah.
Miriam Schulman:
The mothers love to brag to each other how late their kids stay up so they can complete all their honors’ course work and in my house, my kids like to go to bed. My eighteen-year-old, now twenty years old, likes to go to bed by ten o’clock. And my son likes to take naps. After I read your book and it says well you know people do their best work if they only work a few hours a day and I was like “Yeah, I always knew that”. And I’ve been trying to show this book with my friends and they’re like don’t show this to my son. I don’t want him to know about this.
Miriam Schulman:
So what we’re going to dive into today is really, the book is excellent because first of all, I love that it relies on research and yet it was a very easy read because of all of the anecdotes that you’re able to pull into it and different case studies of people across many disciplines which really has made it very interesting. But I noticed you basically broke it down into seven key ingredients which were limiting how many hours you work to maintain maximum concentration using rituals and routines to maximize your creativity, vigorous exercise and walks, sleep and naps, vacation, hobbies, and stopping points.
Miriam Schulman:
And all these resonate with me and of course, we don’t have time to go into everything but I thought if we start with deliberate rest and how you define that, that would be a really great starting point.
Alex Pang:
Sure well, the deliberate rest is rest that we use in order both to recover the energy that we spend working but also to kind of rest that allows our creative subconscious to keep working on problems even while we are apparently to the outside world and our bosses doing nothing at all or when were occupied with other kinds of, often more physical or kind of semi engaging activities.
Alex Pang:
So what I found in my book, and I was looking at Nobel Prize winners, some famous writers, and artists, and such is that they had, the ones who had a lot of control over their times gravitated toward a kind of workday where they do work several really focused intensive hours, you know generally about four hours or five hours tops. And then they would almost immediately go out and do things that look to us to be unproductive right, go on long walks or go out for a swim and other things like that.
Alex Pang:
I mean obviously that kind of thing is good for you, generally, but it helps stimulate your creativity when you kind of lay your work a rest because what happens is that all those ideas that were running around in your brain when you were or still focused deeply on whatever problem you’re working on all that stuff are still in short-term memory when you go out on, you know, go out to the park or you’ll get in the water and go for a swim or go for a bike ride.
Alex Pang:
And so what happens is that if you do it over time, you do consistently your subconscious kind of learns that it’s going to have this period where it can keep working on problems even while your conscious mind is doing other stuff or apparently doing nothing at all, and it learns that this is an opportunity, this is a period where it can explore new ideas, it contracts new stuff, and very often come up with solutions to problems that had eluded your own conscious effort.
Alex Pang:
And what we learn from these lives is that this kind of rest is, first of all, the best kind of deliberate rest is active rather than passive.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay, let me stop you there. Let’s talk about that because let’s delineate the difference between rest where you’re checking emails and looking at Facebook and Instagram versus riding your bike.
Alex Pang:
Right
Miriam Schulman:
Playing soccer or something else. What’s the difference and why is the one restful where the other one may not be?
Alex Pang:
Sure, so you know stuff like taking a break then checking Instagram and Facebook is a break from work in one sense, but your brain actually kind of treats it as very similar to work, right, because you are, you’re engaged. You’re basically using the same parts of your brain and you’re making the same kinds of social valuations or comparisons that you often do when you’re working and so it is a break from work but it’s less restorative than you might think.
Miriam Schulman:
Got it. And I wanted to also highlight something else that you have in your book. Here is something I’ve noticed about myself like I said, a lot of your book was such a relief to me because I’m an artist and I paint. But people who don’t paint for a living will say to me, you know, “You must spend all day painting”. I would lie to them “Yeah, that’s right” knowing full well I may be spending two hours maximum because I would get exhausted mentally after putting out that effort and I have to stop, and you know, not use the cliche and rest.
Alex Pang:
Yeah.
Miriam Schulman:
Let’s dive a little bit into that about being able to maintain the kind of focus, I know you get a lot of research. I know there’s a lot of artists in your book but specifically, you mentioned writers being able to only do a few hours. Could you talk a little bit more about that?
Alex Pang:
Sure, this is one of the mysteries when I first got started which was so many of these people whether they are you know, painters or are novelists, are non-fiction writers, are scientists. It would work really hard but only work for about four, five hours and at first, I thought, well you know, it’s because these people are super-geniuses right. You know, if you’re Einstein you only need to work four hours a day in order to come up with the theory of relativity. But it was an incredibly consistent pattern.
Alex Pang:
And I also found that this is a number that you see in lots of other fields as well. So you know, computer programmers, when they talk about how long they can sustain in serious focus on, you know, what of a piece of code that they’re working on, or musicians when they’re practicing a new piece or trying to perfect performance, they can do about four hours of really serious involved practice a day and then after that their productivity, their ability to concentrate really drops off radically.
Alex Pang:
And so this seems to be a pretty consistent number across fields, and with you know, with lots of difference for young people and for older people as well. And you know the key is recognizing that those, you know if you can get four serious hours that’s actually a great day.
Miriam Schulman:
Another thing I wanted, was a big relief, so not just to myself but my daughter who is twenty years old is in a conservatory practicing cello. You know we talk about competitiveness, there’s also the musicians talking about how they spend all day, you know, practicing six hours back to get into Juilliard and my daughter can’t sustain that without getting an injury. She gets so many injuries. Basically, so we love that section of the book that, basically we all know because of pop psychology, the Gladwell ten thousand hours about having to practice, and what I love is that you introduce rest as a partner to the work, and how important it is to rest and recover in order to make those big strides.
Alex Pang:
You know, one of the things that I argue in the book is that work and rest are not opposites, right, they’re not competitors. We think of them that way but that’s incorrect. They’re really partners and each is necessary to do your best creative work, and you know it’s necessary for a good life. And we even saw that in the study that Gladwell talks about which was, that came up with the original ten thousand hours idea.
Alex Pang:
The authors of that study also noted that the top performers at the conservatory that they were looking at, top performers slept more than the average student, partly because they would take naps during the day and they also were better at accounting for how they spent their free time. So, you know, not only did they practice in a more intensive deliberate way, they also rested in a more intensive deliberate way. And the other thing with ten thousand hours is that ten thousand hours over the course of about ten years which works out to a thousand hours a year, and you figure people take some weekends off and go on vacation, and that’s two hundred fifty days, let’s say.
Miriam Schulman:
Right, so for a few hours.
Alex Pang:
Four hours a day is what you need in order to be a world-class violinist. And it turns out, to be a world-class mathematician, or writer, or just about anything else. The challenge for really creative people is to organize their days so that they get those four hours.
Miriam Schulman:
Let’s talk about that because I know that there’s a whole chapter about routines. You actually named it the morning routine but really it’s about routines and rituals in general.
Alex Pang:
Yeah.
Miriam Schulman:
Let’s talk about what routines play a role and invoking the muse for creativity.
Alex Pang:
Sure, you know, I think, the one important thing is that routines give you a way of organizing your time and resetting your priorities which sounds really straightforward but that’s actually really important. It also provides a place for, as Stephen King put it, the use to land. We tend to think that the way that our work is you get inspired or the screen to break through and then you go to work for eighteen hours on an idea. In reality
Miriam Schulman:
That’s not gonna happen.
Alex Pang:
It works that way sometimes. Every now and then, you know, there’s this romantic idea that creative people have this big inspiration and then you have this intense period we work through the idea. But people who are like writers for a living or who have long creative careers discover that it’s really better to flip that equation. As Stephen King puts it “if you work in a regular manner the views will know where to find you”. And his idea is rather than get inspired and start working, it’s a lot more reliable to start working and then as often as not the inspiration comes.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah, it’s like the Picasso quote that “inspiration finds you working”. And, I think, there’s a similar quote by Chuck Close.
.
Alex Pang:
Exactly, yes.
Miriam Schulman:
Is that what on the top of your head?
Alex Pang:
You know.
Miriam Schulman:
It’s something along the same lines that inspiration is for amateurs.
Alex Pang:
Exactly.
Miriam Schulman:
Professionals go to work.
Alex Pang:
Precisely.
Miriam Schulman:
So, I think, it’s absolutely true that you just kinda have to get started.
Alex Pang:
I find that very reassuring because of the idea of, you know, that flash of creative lightning, you know, having to rely on that is that not that makes for a highly uncertain life. And, I think, the other thing that it recognizes that is an awful lot of the creative work whether you’re, you know, writing a book or you’re working on a painting or composing something, a lot of that work is kind of low level in the sense that what you’re doing is like working out, you know, the balance of color between this part of this section or transitions from this part of your argument to this other part of your argument. That’s not stuff that, you know, it’s not like the apple falling from the tree. But it is a kind of creativity that you need to cultivate and exercise if you’re actually going to produce work and I think that having a routine is really useful for setting up your working life so that you give them to use a place to land.
Miriam Schulman:
I also find it’s helpful to play games with myself and kind of trick, so you talk a lot about in your book how if you go on walks and let your mind wander and you come up with your best ideas. I love to play with my subconscious mind when I paint and I’ll do that by listening to, sometimes, music but even more so if I have an audiobook or podcast it forces my conscious brain to listen and my subconscious mind can actually do the work that’s in front of me and keeps my inner critic mind from chirping in.
Alex Pang:
Yes.
Miriam Schulman:
Because it occupies a certain part of my brain with active listening. Have you done research on that?
Alex Pang:
Certainly, there is a lot of research that confirms the basic idea that part of what you want to do when you are engaged in creative activity is, number one, keep the inner critic at bay. And second and one of the ways to do that is to give that critic or give your conscious mind kind of something else to work on. And for some people that is something as simple as the background noise of a cafe.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah.
Alex Pang:
Right, for some people like working in coffee houses, there’s just enough distraction from bits of conversation, you know, the sound of cutlery, the order for crockery, you know, moving around for their conscious minds to kind of listen, ideally, to that and thus give their creative minds more space to work.
Miriam Schulman:
That’s excellent. I didn’t realize that was the reason. And that actually brings me to another question because there’s a whole section in your book about walks and you talk about how, like Charles Darwin and also I believe the Beatles, you said how they were known to take walks daily and they came up with their best ideas. So, my daughter, this is actually her question. She knows I like to listen to podcasts when I walk. Does that actually ruin what I’m trying to do on the walk? Do I still come up with an idea if I’m like occupying my brain or do you need silence in those walks?
Alex Pang:
I think it really depends on how much you pay attention to the podcast and how much you’re able to let your mind just go. This is one of those areas where you experiment and you figure out what works for you. So, you know, for me I have two dogs and so I, when I’m working on a book I get up super early. I write for a couple of hours then I take them out and I make a point of listening to classical music, usually very simple classical music like Goldberg variations. You know things without a lot of orchestration or heavy ornamentation. And what that does for me is it provides a little bit of auditory distraction but not so much that I’m singing along or paying a lot of attention to the music.
Miriam Schulman:
Got it.
Alex Pang:
And so I’m very conscious about choosing that kind of music as a kind of filtering diversion as opposed to something that I’m really going to listen to carefully. You got to figure out what kind of music or what kind of podcast or audiobook or nothing at all that works for you. And the one thing you can say is everyone’s a little different, everyone’s mileage will vary, everyone can figure this out for themselves.
Miriam Schulman:
One thing I also found interesting is how you talk about deliberate rest and active rest and recovery. And one of the tools you use, speaking about music, you said that listening to music definitely is a tool people can use to recover.
Alex Pang:
Yeah, there’s a whole science now about the psychology of music. But I think that part of what is it, you know, what they found is that partly assuming you’re not a professional musician, music activates parts of the brain that you don’t necessarily use in your day job as some other kind of profession. But it also does so in a way that depending on the kind of music, you know, still gives you time to kind of free-associating your mind to wander. Also, at the same time, it can kind of hook into some of our deepest emotions and provide a level of psychological boost to your energy that can be really valuable when you are, you know, trying to think hard about problems. For all these reasons, music turns out to be something that can be super useful as a kind of creative stimulus and created and components of our kind of daily routines and creative environments.
Miriam Schulman:
You talk about concentration rituals, routines, exercise, walks, sleep, vacation, hobbies, stopping point. And one thing that could come to mind, especially, when you mentioned, in the beginning, your inspiration was how Watson chased girls and played tennis. Well, Picasso, one of the greatest artists of the last century was also one of the greatest womanizers of the last century. So, I don’t know if your research goes into the role that romance, sex, and socializing has creativity. Is that a fair question to throw at you?
Alex Pang:
I think it’s a perfectly fair question. I would say, my reply is that people are all over the boards. You know, you’ve got people, on one hand, like Picasso who was both a notorious womanizer and similarly bad to the people closest to him in his life. You also have the opposite and someone like Charles Darwin who was very happily married to Emma for decades. And then in the middle, you’ve got someone like Albert Einstein who had a capacity for being really cruel to his first wife and generally is pretty good to his second. And, you know, his kids seem like he kind of ignores them. I mean I think all too often, that genius is an excuse for rather than a driver of social behavior, that you know, some people are particularly
Miriam Schulman:
My question wasn’t so much linking misogyny with creativity but maybe more sexuality
Alex Pang:
Interesting.
Miriam Schulman:
So where’s Charles Darwin who was happily married, well okay, so I’m assuming he and his wife had had a healthy sexual relationship. So I guess it was more where my question was, like how much sexuality placing creativity. So that to me that I felt like, that might have been, that was a question mark after reading your book. And also socialization in general. So how much having friends and talking about your work plays a role, I mean, now we’re already diving into some of the content.
Alex Pang:
Right.
Miriam Schulman:
This is interesting stuff to me. Like the impressionists that they’ve always surrounded themselves with their friends and they spent so much time in the cafes just.
Alex Pang:
Alright yeah. No, I mean I think that these are really interesting questions that are difficult to do. And it’s difficult to disaggregate the psychological, sociological stuff, from the politics of genius in the way that people use it to excuse various kinds of bad behavior. And so I kind of have my hands full just making the “rest” argument.
Miriam Schulman:
Yes.
Alex Pang:
I mean I think there is actually a potentially super popular book about the relationship between, particularly, if there’s a positive relationship between sexuality and creativity so you know I don’t think anyone’s written that book yet but it would be a great book to write.
Miriam Schulman:
Yes. So why don’t you tell me a little bit about the work you’re doing now. I know you have a podcast, Rest with Alex.
Alex Pang:
Yep.
Miriam Schulman:
Where you’re interviewing people for your next book. So how is that different? How are you continuing to research for your project?
Alex Pang:
So what I’m interested in now is looking at companies that are putting the ideas behind rest into practice. In particular, I’m interested in companies that are shortening their workdays, they’re moving to four-day workweeks or six-hour, even five-hour workdays. And trying to understand how it is that we can make rest work for companies and organizations as well as for individuals. And I think that you know, so much of constraints that we have that keep us from resting well or from developing better relationships between work and rest have to do with the way we work at the office.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah.
Alex Pang:
And the assumptions that you know, our bosses have about the relationship between time and overwork and productivity and so, you know, finding companies that have pushed back against this. And have shown that you can go to a four-day workweek and still be as productive and profitable as you ever were but also be more sustainable.
Miriam Schulman:
And by the way, I have a full-time assistant. She works thirty hours a week and she doesn’t come in until ten. We don’t start our workday until ten and mostly that was by design because I have to exercise in the morning and I didn’t want to teach her, I didn’t want her showing up when I was still in my sweats.
Alex Pang:
Right.
Miriam Schulman:
She works at ten. It’s in my house so I’ve always told her she has to take a break from one to two and that was because I didn’t want to be responsible for eating lunch with her. And then she works from two to six. So if you see it’s six-hour to, I’m sorry, two to five.
Alex Pang:
Right.
Miriam Schulman:
It’s a six-hour day and it doesn’t start till ten. And she’s so productive.
Alex Pang:
Yeah.
Miriam Schulman:
The problem I’m actually having is she asked for more hours because she wants to make more money but you won’t be more productive so I’m like I don’t know if I just pay her more for working the same amount like.
Alex Pang:
I think your instinct that she won’t be more productive if she works more hours is probably right on. What we’ve seen in lots of offices is that kind of work expands work, stretches to fill time as opposed to becoming more productive or generating more output in that time. I will say that one of the things that we see in these companies is that they will reduce these hours without cutting pay, without cutting benefits and they all report that productivity is as good or better as it’s, you know, as it was before and that, you know, they are or if they wouldn’t think of going back to an eight-hour day or a ten-hour day.
Miriam Schulman:
Sorry, not eight or ten. Right now, she’s at six. She wants seven. She doesn’t come in on Friday. And again, that was that you know, she works from home just for two hours and you get a lot of this just by convenience for me and her. And after I read your book is like, again, “you see”. It is why I’m doing everything the way I am. It’s good to play tennis and only work a few hours a day.
Alex Pang:
Exactly.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah, it was really great. Well, thank you so much for spending this time with us today. I think that my artists are going to get a lot of value from all these insights. And I fully recommend Rest. It’s definitely one of the best self-development books, I think, I read last year. And it’s in paperback now. You can find the link to that on my website. It’s going to be schulmanart.com/rest where you can find links to get the book as well as how to connect with Alex and also your podcast. And be sure we’ll be keeping an eye out for your next book.
Alex Pang:
Thanks very much, it’s been a pleasure talking to you.
Miriam Schulman:
I’m so glad you spent the time with me. I’m really grateful, thank you so much.
Alex Pang:
Ah, thanks again.
Well, I hope you enjoyed that interview as much as I did. And it made your appetite to go check out Alex’s book Rest. You’ll find a link to that on my blog schulmanart.com/rest.
And I would love to hear from you to hear what you thought, how many hours can you sustain your focus when you’re creating art. Leave a comment on the blog or send me a direct message on Instagram or you can even email me Miriam@schulmanart.com. I can’t wait to hear from you.
Now if you liked this episode, you’re also gonna like some episodes we have coming along down the pipe. I’ll be speaking with business coach Cailen Ascher about how she designed her three-day workweek. She cut down her hours after the birth of her first child and discovered not only was she more productive which is actually more profitable when she was working last. So we talk about how artists can do that.
And another episode I have planned for you is I’ll be sharing with you my schedule and how I design my week and my morning routine because I know I’m always curious to hear other people’s morning routines.
Speaking of missing episodes, are you subscribed to my podcast? If you’re not, I want to encourage you to do that right away. I don’t want you to miss any of these episodes. There are a few podcasts that I listen to religiously and I love that I know every time they have a new episode because they get a notification right to my phone. No matter where you’re listening to this episode, make sure you take the opportunity to subscribe so that when I go live you’ll know all about it. The Inspiration Place podcast is available on all major podcast directories including Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, and of course, iTunes.
If you’re listening on iTunes, all you have to do is click that button that says subscribe and you’ll never miss an episode again because I don’t email my list every single time I have a new podcast episode. And I want to make sure you’re subscribed so you’ll know when a new episode is available and you won’t miss anything. All right, that’s it for now. Can’t wait to talk to you again next week, same time, same place. Have an inspirational week.
Thank you for listening to The Inspiration Place podcast. Connect with us on Facebook at facebook.com/schulmanart. On Instagram at schulmanart and of course on schulmanart.com.
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