Like so many people, the pandemic has gotten the best of me emotionally and physically, personally and professionally.
Among the many things I miss about the “before times” is road trips. Not the road trips themselves but rather the random places the road led me. I’m driven, literally, by my sense of wonder sometimes.
Spontaneous discovery has been on my mind a lot lately. And so has burnout. Because I’ve been wanting to get back to blogging, I thought I’d share something from the archives (Well, technically, WPCampus’ archives) that addresses both of these topics.
Beat Burnout With Curiosity, Surprise & Play: A Presentation
In 2018, I was fortunate enough to present a lightning round talk called “All Work and No Fun? Nonsense! — How Creativity, Curiosity, Surprise & Play Help Us Work” at two of my favorite higher education conferences, HighEdWeb (in Sacramento) and WP Campus (in St. Louis).
The entire WP Campus event, including my session, was live-streamed and recorded — and the content is available to anyone. I’ve embedded the talk here; give it a listen (and/or watch! But, never fear, I’ll also include some highlights from the talk later in this post.
Watch it here:
(Correction: the author of Curiosity is Ian Leslie, not Nathan Leslie; I goofed in my slide deck and, thus, in my presentation.)
An Audience of One: A Quick Sidebar About the Timing of This Post
I’ll share some key takeaways from my talk, but first, a quick sidebar.
The reason I’m writing this blog post right now, is because I rediscovered this talk/recording today. A writer I know (Laraine Herring) shared a social media post about finally receiving a book she’d been anticipating (there’d been a shipping hangup). The title immediately grabbed my attention: Tracking Wonder: Reclaiming a Life of Meaning and Possibility in a World Obsessed With Productivity (by Jeffrey Davis). Yup. I bought it right away too.
WONDER. One of my favorite words. One of my favorite pastimes. But the only thing I’ve been wondering lately is why I don’t wonder as often as I used to.
“…the only thing I’ve been wondering lately is why I don’t wonder as often as I used to.”
So of course my mind went back to this talk on creativity, back to when I was more vocal about playing more and working less, about not taking life too seriously. I was elated to find the video of the WP Campus version of the presentation online — and I watched it. Twice.
Hearing myself say these words — hearing how excited I was to share this stuff — had WAY more impact than if I would have simply referred back to my old slide deck.
Truth be told, I needed to hear these words. I needed to hear them now. It was sort of an out-of-body experience, if you will. It was like I wasn’t listening to me, but rather someone wise.
Like when a time traveler leaves notes to their future self, present me needed to learn from past me. In other words, when I presented this in 2018, I had no idea that the most important audience member would be a future version of myself.
And if I needed to hear it, I know others may benefit, too. So here be this post, mateys.
Key Takeaways from My Talk on Play & Curiosity
Even though my talk on curiosity and creativity was just over 10 minutes, it was packed full of tips. Here are just a few:
Wonder
Always ask “what if…?” No matter how silly that “what if?” might be. That’s where innovation comes from. Some of the most important inventions and innovations probably came from a question someone was ridiculed for asking. Ask anyway.
Curiosity — wondering, asking, investigating — is truly powerful The more we pay attention to the world around us, the more we can make connections that “ordinary observers” don’t always see. And that leads to extraordinary things, friends.
Wander
Take the long way home. Go off the beaten path. Let yourself get lost. Wandering aimlessly — whether close to home or across the country — can lead to discovery (and fun) and you never know where it might actually lead you.
Wait
Among the elements of play is my favorite element: anticipation. In a day of instant access to information — in a day of spoilers — we’ve lost that joy of the wait. Waiting for tickets to go on sale, waiting for that next episode to come out. But when you sit down to start a board game or venture out for a road trip, part of the fun is the unexpected.
I wholeheartedly believe we need anticipation to make a comeback and that we need resist the urge to get things — anything — instantaneously.
“…we’ve lost that joy of the wait.”
Make Time to Read & Reflect
While you can’t exactly plan to be spontaneous because, well, duh, what you CAN do is be more intentional about the time in your day. In my talk I shared a tactic I used at my former place of employment to do just that.
I blocked off time to think.
At that job, as is typical in many places of employment, we shared Outlook calendars in order to see each other’s availability. So I made myself UNavailable for small blocks of time each day by setting a recurring event for “thinking time” and “reading time.” To the casual passerby, it might appear that sitting and staring at the wall is “doing nothing.” But let’s not underestimate the power of nothing.
“Reflection is an important element of putting ideas into action…”
Reflection is an important element of putting ideas into action — if you’re inspired here and there but never really let things sink in, you could lose that spark. So these time blocks gave me a formal way to feed my curiosity (in this case, because it was at my day job, it was to focus on career-adjacent topics that piqued my interest.)
A Reminder to Be WONDERful
I wouldn’t say I ever lost my sense of wonder. But I was reminded today of just how much less I see that part of me today. As I mentioned, like so many others, the past few years I’ve been more stressed and anxious (which has spiraled into a range of things that warrant a separate blog post). The lack of traveling has also led to less literal wandering, which has also impacted my mood and motivation to, well, do anything.
It starts today, an effort to wake up my sense of wonder, dig up my desire to wander. It starts today, with this blog post.
Be wonderful with me?