Or: The Most Productive Nothing I’ve Ever Done

A few weeks ago, I gave you a five-step plan to improve your creativity by embracing boredom. I also admitted that I hadn’t completed the five-step program myself. I had yet to practice niksen, the Dutch practice of doing nothing.

If I’m being honest, I was afraid to attempt it. As someone with ADHD, the idea of sitting with absolutely nothing was intimidating in the extreme. Despite being a regular meditator, I often practice walking meditation in the mornings, and rarely for more than fifteen minutes.

But this blog is as much about teaching myself as it is about passing on what I’ve learned through my life. So on Monday I sat down and did nothing for half an hour.

Setting the Scene

Andrew Snavely of Primer Magazine recommends doing Niksen on your porch, if you have one. I agree with this. Being outside, where you can see the vastness and complexity of nature, always gets my creative juices flowing. It gets me out of myself and reminds me of how small my problems are in comparison to the world. In a sense, it helps me touch something ineffable and divine, a place where many think all creativity comes from.

Unfortunately, it’s August and I live in the San Fernando Valley. As stunning as my view of the mountains is, I lasted for, quite literally, three minutes before I was so sweaty that my shirt adhered to my chair. Maybe I’ll try again in Autumn.

Instead, I sat in my reading nook. A chez-lounge chair next to a little desk in the corner of my living room. I brought my notebook and pen and set my phone to Do Not Disturb so only emergencies could get through to me. Then I placed my phone clear across the room. No way to reach it without standing up from my chair.

I set a timer to 30 minutes and turned it around so I couldn’t pass the time watching the time pass.

And I sat down and did nothing.

The Relaxing Power of Doing Nothing

I am not going to lie to you, hypothetical readers. This was hard. However, it wasn’t as hard as I thought. I expected to leave my niksen experience tired. Exhausted from the effort of keeping my brain under control and resisting the urge to get up and do something. Do anything.

Instead, I left the experience relaxed. 

It reminded me of a video my friend Chris Csont, the man behind John August’s Inneresting newsletter, once showed me. In it, a Buddhist monk held a glass of water and compared it to the mind. The water was never still, thanks to the small micro-tremors in his hand, the settling of the earth, etc. 

You can try to still the water by holding it still, the monk said. But you can only do it for so long before you tire and the water begins to ripple again. Instead, the monk suggested an easier way.

He put the glass of water down.

That was what this felt like. I put the glass of water down. My mind rippled for a while, looking for a distraction. But it didn’t take very long for it to simply make peace with what we were doing. I let it wander, undirected, bouncing from project to project, thought to thought, without much care of what I got out of it.

That isn’t to say it was an unproductive session. I went in with two major problems on my plate.  The first was breaking the plot of a horror feature I’m outlining. The second was the keystone phrase for a marketing campaign for a client. 

I found solutions for both.

Breaking the Outline

For the outline, I realized that my characters were too passive. I had been picturing them as simply doing their jobs as their co-workers vanished and the dead mall they worked in mutated into something impossible. They weren’t actively pursuing anything while the world warped and shifted around them.

Many of my favorite horror movies feature protagonists actively trying to investigate and understand the nightmare they’ve found themselves in. Who poke and prod at the mystery like a scab over a wound in reality. It’s a terrible idea to pick off those scabs, but they just can’t help it.

Think John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness or In The Mouth of Madness, which feature characters who are paid to solve mysteries. But even slasher-style movies like Nightmare on Elm Street or It Follows feature characters actively looking for answers so they can return to their normal lives.

It’s a basic insight, yes, but that was the theme of my niksen experience. It gave me clarity to remember and apply the basics.

Understanding The Audience

I have a pitch meeting with my client next week and can’t share the details of the campaign or my insight until after it’s been approved and launched. I can speak generally about what niksen helped me remember.

I’d done quite a bit of research on my client’s audience and product. It’s a fantastic product, and he’s always excited to list the many, many features it has that make it so. 

However, a feature is not a benefit. Features are things products do. Benefits are how those features make the client’s life better. Niksen cut out all distractions and forced me to genuinely consider the features. What benefits come from those features. And most importantly:

What is the most important benefit my client’s customer’s will get if they buy with him. 

It was a parade of the same question: “Okay, so what?”. Without anything else to distract me from that one question, I drilled deep until I couldn’t go any further. That’s what the keystone benefit is going to be.

Will I Do This Again?

Hell, yes I will. Without question – I found this an incredible exercise, albeit a time-consuming one. It does exactly what it promises. It refreshes the mind and opens you up to creativity. It forces you to, as Cal Newport would say, go deep.

So if you want to go deep (and you probably do if you’re a writer) I invite you to join me on Sundays. Sit down with nothing more than your notebook and pen and just… do nothing.