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White Space Time

I love the idea of white space time… Now to find some… Article is on Jim Collins…

One of his favorite quotes comes from the famously disciplined French novelist Gustave Flaubert: "Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." For Collins, high-quality work requires long stretches of high-quality thinking. "White space," as he calls it, is the prerequisite for fresh, creative thought. It’s the time that he spends with nothing scheduled, so that he can empty his mind, like the proverbial teacup, and refill it with new thought.

He aims to spend 100 days next year in the white space. "As a great teacher, Rochelle Myers, taught me, you can’t make your own life a work of art if you’re not working with a clean canvas," he says. (Another smart bit of Collins philosophy: "Speak less. Say more.")

2 Responses

  1. By Chris Bell on December 6th, 2009 at 6:00 pm

    The Flaubert quote is one also associated with the late composer Frank Zappa, but mainly because it was cited by a biographer (Ben Watson, in ‘The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play’); Zappa apparently found it funny that someone would mention Flaubert in the same breath

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