A couple weeks ago, my son was on spring break and we went to see the Da Vinci exhibit at the California Science Center. It was an excellent exhibit. They basically hired a bunch of craftsmen to create the things that were in Da Vinci’s journals and bring them to life and then they ranked them all how well they actually worked. Some of them worked really well and some of them didn’t work at all. Some of them were just terrible ideas, but still fun to see brought to life.
The thing that really struck me as I was walking through the exhibit was that this was a man who had time to just think and ideate and jot down and scribble about any idea that came to him. That was his life, just thinking up stuff.
He had an idea for a 360 weapon that threw rocks like a cross between a machine gun and a cannon, but in 360. Why? Who would ever need that? Doesn’t matter. The point is he had all these wonderfully creative ideas. I had a moment where I paused and thought, “this man had time.”
If he had kids, he almost certainly wasn’t in charge of caring for them. The Medicis were his patrons, so he didn’t worry much about money from what I understand. He had time to just think.
I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I was super jealous. I mean, to just have nothing to do but play with ideas all day? Yes, please. It got me thinking about how I might carve out more time for myself to just sit and think about stuff, to play with ideas.
So how do we make time for that in our busy lives when we work full time, when we have kids, when we have parents that we care for, or demanding pets? How do we make time to just sit and think and play with ideas?
The first thought that came to mind was from a book I read last summer called We Should All Be Millionaires by Rachel Rogers. If you have not read this book, it’s definitely worth picking up. One of the things she really advocates for is hiring help.
And this is something that I’ve done pretty well in my business. I have people who help me with things like organizing my online Mindful Writing Community or, you know, just helping me make sure that things get done, that I hit my deadlines, but I haven’t really engaged much help in my personal life.
One of the things that she advocates for is hiring someone to just help you with things, particularly if you are a person who runs a household, if you’re a care taker or if you just have a lot of fairly easy things that need to be done all the time, like house cleaning and grocery shopping and walking the dogs.
I’m feeling the need to get better at delegating some of the more menial tasks in my life so that I can free up more time to be like Da Vinci and just sit around and think or take long walks and let story ideas come to me.
So I’m curious – has anyone out there found a good way to carve out time to just think, to just play with ideas? And if so, do you have any tips or tricks you could share? Did you hire help? Do you just sleep less? Did you find some creative way to engage technology? Can AI clean my floors yet?
If you have any thoughts, drop them in the comments.
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