The Importance Of Doing Nothing

Photo by Meeke

Are you always so consumed with your work or business?

Rushing from one meeting to another and finishing deadlines left and right? Or attending company events every night?

I'm sure your pretty much stressed out and very fatigued by now.

Friends, it's time you stop, take a break, relax for a while and just do nothing. Not only will this refresh, re-energize and rejuvenate you, but it will also help you think and come up with new ideas that can improve your work or business or ideas for a new business or project .

Once in a while it's important that you do nothing at all, especially if you're the boss or you want to be the boss. Why? Because, it's when you relax, enjoy and just simply do nothing, that good ideas come to you. Ideas that you might not have seen or thought of because of your very hectic and heavy schedule. 

Have you seen the movie The Internship? It's a movie that is starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, two salesman who find themselves in a very competitive internship at Google after their careers are made obsolete by the digital age. Vince and Owen were teamed with four other people (Josh Brener, Dylan O'Brien, Tobit Raphael and Tiya Sicar) and they have to compete with other teams in a series of tasks where the team with the highest points at the end of the competition gets hired by Google.

It's a nice feel good movie that you should watch.

Anyway there's a scene there that best illustrates the importance of doing nothing. One of their task was to come up with a Google App that they need to make available online. The App with the highest number of downloads wins the task.

Their four teammates were busy brainstorming on what kind of App to create. Since they are not that knowledgeable in the digital age, Vince and Owen were not much help to their teammates (they were actually more of a distraction at first). The team was getting nowhere, while their biggest rival (the leader of their rival team is played by Aasif Mandvi) is already getting high numbers of download from their App. 

Owen and Vince then convinced their teammates that they should just lighten up and enjoy for a while. The App that they need will eventually come to them. Their teammates reluctantly agreed and they all went to a strip club. There they partied, got drunk and just basically enjoyed themselves. They even got into a fight and was thrown out of the club. Before going back to Google headquarters, they went into a spot where they got a good view of the Golden Gate Bridge. 

Then one of their teammates (Josh), wanted to send a picture to a girl he liked in the club. But the picture is an indecent one, so his teammates was telling him that he is drunk and he should not send it. And to prove he was drunk, Vince asked a question where Josh was able to answer it with ease. They asked a more difficult question where he was unsure of the answer. And it was in that moment that Owen was able to come up with the idea for their App. They would make a Quiz App, where the people need to answer a series of questions first as proof they are not drunk before they send out anything through their mobile phone.

The App got a lot of download and they won the task.

The reason they came up with the App was because they were able to think clearly. Without the stress, tension and pressure of wanting to win, they were able to come up with a great idea that they might have overlooked had they not decided to just relax and enjoy.

It's important that we have a moment in our busy lives to just relax, enjoy and do nothing. Doing this will help sharpen and clear our mind, thus enabling us to come up with good ideas that can help improve our work or business or ideas for a new business or project.