Ask New Questions
When you’re feeling stuck in your work, stagnant in your thoughts, or bored in your writing, it’s easy to feel like the inner spring has run dry, or there’s no well of ideas to tap.
Boredom is frequently considered a prerequisite to creativity, maybe because, for some of us, boredom is so uncomfortable we’re willing to go to inventive extremes to sidestep it. The British Psychological Society points out that boredom provokes at least as much pain as does effort, and maybe more.
But to push past boredom’s dead-end, we don’t really have to get that inventive. We can instead approach it as a cue to formulate new questions about old ideas. When we feel its telltale signs–restlessness, disinterest, and a sense we’ve become flat and featureless, we can pause and ask:
- What am I interested in?
- What do I not yet know about the things I’m interested in?
- What else do I want to find out about?
- What do I think I already know about the things I don’t know?
- What other intuitions do I have about my interests?
- How can I test my intuitions?
Questions can be useful interventions because they direct us toward answers. They contain a provocation that pushes us toward places we aren’t. Just by asking the questions, we can generate the movement that makes effort seem less like a choice than an imperative. How else will we find our answers?