One of the
best jobs I've ever had
was with the largest life insurance company in Africa: Old Mutual,
headquartered in Pinelands near Cape Town in
South Africa.
Old Mutual had a
world
class data center driven by mainframe computers. In mainframe data
centers, computer tasks are either run in batch mode
(programs are run by an operator for users) or in
interactive mode (programs are run by users who have
access to the mainframe via a screen). Old Mutual, making the
transition from solely batch processing, to batch processing plus
interactive processing, hired me to prepare programs for the
transition, an endeavor we called The Interactive Project.
The Interactive Project would involve many, many months of programming.
At first I sat at a desk in an open office for a traditional nine to
five work day. Soon I realized I would get a lot more work
done if I could work at night when I wasn't distracted or disturbed.
Fortunately, both for me as well as for Old Mutual, I was able to
convince my manager to allow me to work my usual eight hours a day and
also determine at what time during the day I would schedule those eight
hours. It could
work.
Old Mutual's data center was a
24 / 7 / 365
operation.
My manager, to his credit, agreed to give it a try. I came in to the
data center from 11:00pm through 7:00am during which time I did the
equivalent of two or more normal days' work. I then went home to my
apartment, St Mungo on the sands of pristine Clifton Beach,
surfed
the waves outside my front door on my paddleski, then slept from
1:00pm through 8:00pm, turning my day around through twelve hours.
It was all very nice. No, it was awesomesurfing
by day, programming one of
the world's
most powerful computers by night. But that's only my introduction to
this
conversation.
It's not what I want to share. What I want to share is what I
experienced in Old Mutual's data center working alone from 11:00pm
through 7:00am.
The first thing I did on arriving at work was rearrange the tables, on
each of which stood a computer screen and a keyboard. I moved twelve
tables into a horseshoe formation, placing a wheeled office chair in
the middle so I could easily slide from one screen to the
next.
One of the constraints I had working regular hours was I had only one
desk, only one screen, and only one keyboard to work with. Running any
particular task on the computer meant waiting for the task on the
screen to complete before starting the
next
one - time consuming indeed.
Time consuming, yes, and also enormously frustrating for me since the
speed of my thoughts way exceeded the speed of the computer's response
time. Working with twelve screens and twelve keyboards simultaneously
gave me the ability to start one task, then slide over to the
next
screen to start another task while the first one executed, then slide
over to the third screen to start another task while the first task and
the second task executed, then slide back to the first screen when its
task completed, then slide over to the fourth screen etc. I could get
an
unimaginable
amount of work done this way in a very short timeframe. And this way,
the combined speed of the twelve screens' response times exceeded the
speed of my thoughts, driving me to think deeper, more
creatively,
more intently, more
detailed-ly,
more efficiently, more
tersely.
My
actions
during such intense sessions, were a good fit for the phrases "juggling
many balls in the air" and "having many irons in the fire"
simultaneously. But "many" as in "more than one at any particular
time", doesn't quite cut it. It was more like hundreds of
developing ideas at any one particular time. And if I dropped any one
of those juggled balls, if I lost track of any one of those fired
irons, if I couldn't set aside an idea to pursue another emerging one
then get back to develop the original idea later, or (worse) if I set
aside one of those ideas intending to get back to it to develop it
later and then lost track of it entirely in the melee of
everything I was tracking at the time, it could spell total disaster, a
complete fiasco with everything tumbling down like a house of
cards.
It was a crucial training for me. During these sessions I really
learned to think.
Programming through twelve screens simultaneously, my
attention
was fully focused on the tasks at hand. There was no focus on anything
else ie there was
nothing going
on
with me personally.
It was during these most intense sessions with
literally hundreds of ideas going on at once, all of which had to
dovetail and mesh eventually, when it was the most
quiet.
And in the
context
of this
quiet,
in the
context
of this
nothing going on
with me personally, what
showed up
was
creativity,
creativity
like I'd never experienced it before in my life.
In this ultra-quiet,
ultra-creative
time
with nothing going on
when (for all intents and purposes) I was completely
empty
while the most prolific
creativity
was occurring, I started watching where my thoughts and
creativity
were coming from. What I saw, I couldn't grasp. I couldn't grasp what I
saw because it didn't make any sense. It didn't make any sense
because I couldn't explain what I saw.
When I finally stopped trying to explain what I saw, when I finally
stopped trying to figure it out and instead simply
got what I saw, it became quite evident my thoughts come
from
nothing.
They're not here (nothing) ... and then they're here
(thinking). It also became quite evident my
creativity
comes from
nothing.
It's not here (nothing) ... and then it's here
(creating).
That's preposterous - but it's true: thoughts and
creativitycome from
nothing.
It doesn't
work
when I communicate this by explaining it or by arguing it or by
debating it or by analyzing it or by intellectualizing it - and
believe
me: I've tried. You, however, can get it for yourself as an experience.
Being clear about it as an experience is crucial for real thought and
for true
creativity.
Before you can really think, before you can truly
create,
before you can truly invent anything, you have to be able
to get
nothing
- which is to say you have to be able to
createnothing.
