I'm Jocelyn K. Gly, and this is Hurry Slowly, a podcast about pacing yourself,

where I explore how you can be more productive, creative, and resilient through the simple act of slowing down.

I want to talk today about two ideas that I've been meditating on quite a bit of late.

Creativity and efficiency.

And specifically about how and why they have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

In fact, I would argue that the creative process actively resists efficiency.

Creativity is messy and organic and chock full of what startup people like to call friction,

which is, let's be honest, a little bit frustrating because everything else around us just seems to keep moving faster and faster and becoming more and more frictionless.

We can watch movies instantly. We can listen to music instantly. We can practically get our groceries instantly.

So many things in our everyday lives and our working lives are becoming more efficient.

We've become accustomed to a kind of effortless convenience.

Ask and ye shall receive.

And I think there's a really interesting tension here.

Between the pace of technology and the pace of creativity.

It's a tension that the writer Louis Hyde captures perfectly in his classic book, The Gift, where he makes a distinction between work and creative labor.

Here's Hyde.

Work is what we do by the hour.

It begins and if possible we do it for money.

Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work,

washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward,

picking asparagus. These are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid

for it, but it's harder to quantify. Writing a poem, raising a child,

...