I'm Gretchen Rubin and this is a little happier.

In episode 92 of Happier, Elizabeth and I interviewed Manouche Zomorodi, the host and managing

editor of the terrific podcast Note to Self, which is the tech show about being human.

And Manouche has a fascinating book coming out soon called Board and Brilliant, how spacing

out can unlock your most productive and creative self.

And I was so excited to read the Galley because this is the subject that has interested

me for a long time, which is what is the role of boredom in creativity.

And in that book, she tells the most wonderful story that illustrates the importance of boredom.

So this is about J.R.R. Tolkien and I'm a huge, crazy, raving fan of children's literature

and J.R.R. Tolkien, of course, is the author of The Hobbit and then The Fellowship of the

Retrology, which are these wonderful, wonderful books, wonderful movies.

They're for adults, they're for children, they're tearing classics of world literature.

So how did these books come to be written?

Well, she tells the story that in the early 1930s, J.R.R. Tolkien was professor of Anglo-Saxon

at Oxford.

And he was making extra money by grading papers.

And anyone who has ever had to grade papers know that this is a very boring and archivist

task to do.

So he's grading away and he comes upon a blank page, a page that the student has not

written on.

And on that page, he wrote kind of out of nowhere, in a hole in the ground, there lived

a Hobbit.

...