As I sat with various deadlines and feeling greatly under pressure and thus, pretty stressed BUT… procrastinating…I heard this interview on NPR radio. I too used to delude myself to think that I work better under pressure but no longer – it’s just not good for your health besides losing your mind & creative juices – choose to, as Judith would say, “relax radically”.:
I was doing what I thought was relaxing, but was actually just killing time: I was on Facebook. And a friend of mine posted a video from the Toronto Film Festival of Bill Murray talking about his approach to acting — or his philosophy about life, I guess. And it just completely blew me away, because he said, “Whatever your job is, the more relaxed you are, the better you are.”
And to me this was just like, “What are you talking about? I forgot that word even existed!” Because I very much was a person who was motivated by stress; I would use a deadline as a motivator. I think a lot of people do that, where they’re like, “I’ll just wait until the last minute, and that’ll light a fire underneath me and I’ll get it done.” And I just kept thinking, “Well, that’s a terrible way to live. Why am I building a house and lighting a fire in the basement just to see if I can finish the roof before it burns down my whole house?”
I started realizing how important it is to truly relax, and in relaxing, to be bored. You have to be bored. If you’re not bored, your mind is never gonna wander, and if your mind never wanders, you’re never gonna get lost in thought, and you’re never gonna find yourself thinking things you wouldn’t have otherwise thought.
Dan Deacon On Computers, College And ‘Electronic Music’
Dan Deacon
ALL SONGS CONSIDERED
Haruku Murakami would say “I never got bored” but what he means is that he never gets bored because when he is creating his sentences or wondering in thoughts, maybe even lost in thoughts and dreams, “boredom” is not the vocabulary he uses – but these two highly creative men are essentially saying the same thing in a different way.
