The importance of pause for creativity, opportunity and a good life

In a world moving at break-neck speed and running constantly, taking a moment of pause can seem a counter-cultural and challenging act. But to prosper — and for our wellbeing and sanity, we need the ability to pause. In this excerpt from his new book Do Pause, Rob Poynton champions this subtle yet powerful idea as a vital part of the creative process and more.

Since you never know what it is that might start, pause makes an important contribution to creativity. There are patterns to creative processes. One of the patterns that people who study creativity observe is that there is always a discontinuity, or gap, or delay. In short — a pause.

For example, in Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson talks of the ‘slow hunch’. He argues that new ideas are ‘fragile creatures, easily lost to the more pressing needs of day-to-day issues’. Slow hunches don’t develop if you work relentlessly on a problem. They are ‘less a matter of perspiration than cultivation’ and, like a crop, require fallow periods. It is a living process, not a mechanical one.

“You don’t get to novelty directly.”

Creative director Jack Foster, in How to Get Ideas, is explicit about this. He has ‘Forget about it’ as one of the stages of his idea-generation process. He cites fellow ad man James Webb Young’s 1934 classic A Technique for Producing Ideas, as well as the German philosopher Helmholtz and a number of academic researchers. All of them include a stage of disconnection from the task at hand. They may call it ‘mental digestion’ or ‘incubation’ but the creative process, however you look at it, has some kind of pause built into it. You don’t get to novelty directly.