Imagine yourself sitting alone in your customer’s office waiting for your next appointment and, thanks to coming earlier, you still have 15 minutes to burn. Similarly, you are alone inside a cab on your way to a meeting and get stuck in a traffic jam that possibly will be for another 20 minutes. What would you do? I am willing to bet my house that you will whip your smartphone out of your pocket or tablet out of your briefcase and start hovering your fingers over that sumptuous touchscreen wondering what apps your finger should land on. You may hook your earphones to your ear, pump up the volume and tune your auditory perception out from your surroundings. Not enough, made possible by your gadget, you can browse and update your social media simultaneously and get blind in addition to deaf to what is going on around you.

Have you ever put yourself in the same situation but it happened years ago when the smart gadgets were not invented yet? What would you do? In my own experience, more often than not, I would start reading my paperback novel or magazines. If those are not accessible, then I would stand or sit still, let my mind wander and get bored, and maybe fidgeting a little with my pen.

I have done this non-tech and silence moment many times recently and to my surprise, out of boredom, some creative ideas, well at least to my standard, formed up in my mind. This can range from how to do things better in my everyday life and work, a person who has been buried in my subconscious level whom I should talk to, how to make use of a broken thing in my desk, what errands I should run, the topic of my next blog, and how I start my journey in discovering The Theory of Everything in my own way. As I woke up from this daydreaming, I realized many things have been accomplished in my mental boundary and I have acquired large volume of raw materials to get going. Something that otherwise I couldn’t have achieved had I let myself immersed in my personal gadgets.

The same state happens every time I go for my run. I never like to listen to music when I run no matter how often I’ve tried. The sweetest musing in my ear is the sound of my puffs, the rhythmic sound of my foot pouncing on the pavement, and the subtle sound of breeze blowing on my hair. As additional bonus for not getting myself wired, the similar daydreams as I mentioned above crawl inside my mind. I could have some inspirations as minor as what ice cream flavours I should try and as groundbreaking as what I should do to stop us from burning fossil fuel and prevent the blue planet from becoming grey.

Perhaps we should dedicate more time of getting bored and letting our minds wander to achieve great things. Isaac Newton hatched the gravity formula while sitting in the porch, drinking tea, and looking aimlessly at the trees. Steve Jobs liked to meditate which is basically the act of emptying your mind, concentrating on your breath and imagining the flow of the air in and out of your body. Archimedes was getting bored in the bath looking blankly at the Heiro’s crown when suddenly an idea hit him square in the face, ’Eureka’, and the rest is history.

Next time when you do nothing, resist the temptation to whip out your smartphone, let yourself bored and your mind wander. It is a profound start for creative thinking and before you know it, the next big thing maybe coming our way.