A skill not commonly taught in school, and certainly not taught (or even encouraged) in our deadline-driven workplace is the art of incubating ideas. Not all ideas spring from our brains like the Athena fully grown from the head of Zeus. As often as not, they take time. The brain quietly, in the background, processes a thought, and idea, a plan and, when the idea is ripe it falls into our laps. One of my favorite expressions of this process was articulated by Albert Einstein, someone who well understood the process of intellectual incubation:

Einstein at Princeton, 1950.

“As one grows older, one sees the impossibility of imposing your will on the chaos with brute force. But if you’re patient, there may come that moment when while eating an apple, the solution presents itself politely and says,’Here I am.'”

Another favorite example of this idea is from a column “Peters on Excellence” by Tom Peters. He describes the process of a producer at CBS who consistently produced outstanding documentaries, but drove his overseers nuts. Peters describes his methodology once he obtained approval for a new project:

“He’d return to his office, sit quietly, and mull. And mull. Days would pass. Weeks would pass. Often as not, months would pass, “When in hell is he going to go out on the road and shoot?” the hierarchs wanted to know. One day his office would be empty, and a few weeks later he’d be back with canisters of film in hand. Did he start editing? Fat chance. Back to the office. Feet up. Mull. Massive accumulations of pipe ash. Eventually, he’d head for the editing room, and a near perfect show would emerge. The sequence was repeated time and again, and the results were invariably so good that CBS’ muckety-mucks had little choice but to put up with his aberrant behavior.”

It’s true that incubating an idea requires time. My personal experience and that of some of my colleagues is that to attempt to force the process or somehow bring an idea out into the light before it is sufficiently grown enough to stand on its own is to invite frustration, if not disaster. Sometimes, I find that it takes much more work to get an idea prematurely acted upon to make sense. I can’t say for certain how I know this, but usually it’s a realization somewhere between curse words of what the solution is or should be, coupled with the clear insight that I would have arrived at this newer, more elegant solution had I just waited a little longer.

It’s true that the process cannot be rushed, but there are ways to improve its efficiency. I know of several thinkers and scholars who are in the habit of putting a problem to themselves before going to sleep at night. Often, when they wake, they find they have made progress on the problem. I have tried this myself with mixed success, but I have not endeavored to make a habit of it, and I should.

Isaac Asimov had his own methods for letting his brain work in the background. For him, the solution was a “B” movie. Some cheesy, not-terribly-deep piece of cinematography that would disengage his brain for a bit and give his mind time to work. He wrote that as he left the theater he found that he often had made progress on the problem.

To respect the process of incubation demands time and some pockets of serenity. It requires the “zone of silence” Sertillanges so eloquently insists is a sine qua non for the intellectual life. Out modern society is filled to the gills with ways to save time, but what it gives with one hand it takes with the other. As I mentioned in a previous post about leisure, you must fight for the time to think and ruminate.

Try some of these techniques. Seek to give your mind the room to do its work quietly in the background in its own inexorable way. In exchange for your patience, your brain might just make you look brilliant.