The Radical Act of Doing Nothing
🌟Career Coaching: Your next creative breakthrough might be hiding inside a quiet stretch of laziness.
When I was a kid, I was lucky enough to spend a few summers at Crystal Lake in northern Michigan.
No internet. No screens. Just long days where the only real rule was to get out of the cabin and play outdoors.
We rode bikes, jumped off docks, played games that had no intelligible rules. But most of all, we just chilled. We stared at the water. Watched dragonflies. Listened to birds.
No one needed us to be productive. No one expected a performance.
And in that space, my imagination ran wild. Crazy stories would form in my head. I’d make up songs and poems. I’d dream about my life in New York City, where I had never been, but had already decided to call my home at the earliest opportunity.
Fast forward to adulthood and the idea of “doing nothing” feels almost dangerous. A wasted opportunity. A threat to momentum. Especially now–when democracy is showing its fragility and the entertainment industry is showing its fear–pausing can feel like apathy.
But the human brain needs downtime. Research (by actual scientists!) shows that our most original ideas come after we’ve unplugged. Creativity isn’t a faucet we turn on by force. It’s a current that flows best when it’s not clogged with constant input.
Time with friends, face-to-face. Laughing in the kitchen. Reading a tawdry paperback in a hammock. Watching the sky change color.
This isn’t avoidance, it’s alignment. Chilling out doesn’t make you less responsive to the world. It makes you more capable of responding well.
Greenlight Yourself Into Laziness
I’m giving myself permission to take the rest of the week off. To turn off my brain. To rejuvenate. To walk down a path toward mental clarity.
Clarity rarely arrives when you're constantly getting news alerts or feeling pressured by a long to-do list. It comes when you step away long enough to hear your own thoughts again.
I hope you join me in letting your own “lake-day” version of yourself return. The one who found stories in the clouds. The one who could wade in the water for hours and call it a great afternoon.
That version of you is still in there, and it might be the key to the next brave thing you’ll create.
So before you guilt yourself into catching up on email and podcasts or doing random chores, ask yourself: what if your most radical move this week was doing absolutely nothing for a stretch of time?
Let this Fourth of July holiday be slow. Let it be barefoot. Light the charcoal. Watch the flags flap at the end of pontoon boats while neighbors wave from lawn chairs. Let your dog go berserk when the kids down the road set off firecrackers way too early.
Set aside any fear of missing out.
You might just find your next great idea while you're navel-gazing on a porch.
Let it come. Don’t chase it. Let it arrive.
100%, or maybe >100%... what a great reminder that our (day)dreams are where it all started.