The key to creative breakthroughs: BOII

I’m hopelessly, obnoxiously addicted to my phone. Mainly, it’s because my work is public, and whenever someone says something to me or about me, my lizard brain goes, “You might die!!! CHECK IT NOW!!!”

Really, nothing changes during the moments where I force myself to put down the phone, close the laptop, and stop thinking about social media.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. Something does change: My mind wanders. I’m able to get bored.

I think we’ve traded moments of boredom for moments of mindless consumption, and that’s really unfortunate. Boredom is where so many breakthroughs begin. We can use an acronym to explain it: BOII.

First comes Boredom. Boredom happens when there’s nothing immediate to do, nothing of particular interest commanding our attention. Boredom happens when we stare out the passenger seat window on a long drive, or sit at a coffee shop with our favorite drink and just look around. (Can you imagine? Who’s that lunatic?!)

Next, after boredom, we make Observations. When we’re not stuffing a screen in our face, or any quick solution for boredom, we become more mindful and begin to make observations. Sometimes, the observation is of the world right in front of us. Other times, our subconscious has been working on a problem, and something finally starts to make sense. “Ah ha!” Either way, being boredom removes stimuli and allows us to make observations — a first and crucial step in any inquiry, any path towards a breakthrough.

Once we observe something, we can then turn it over in our minds. This is Interrogation. Why IS the sky outside this window blue? Why ARE things the way they are? Why do we act that way? Questioning conventional norms, the status quo, and the world around us is a vital step towards our fourth and final piece to this: Insight.

When we interrogate an observation, we turn it over and over in our minds, and we start to make sense of it. That leads to an insight, something we hadn’t realized or had forgotten, as it had been buried under the monotony of our daily rush to avoid boredom.

Boredom. Observation. Interrogation. Insight. 

When bored, you’re forced to see things. Truly. Those observations are like little threads you can pull, interrogating them, asking tougher questions you can’t simply google to answer. And it’s there that we find meaningful insights that can be the breakthrough we needed all along.

And to think, all it took was a willing to get a little bored.

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