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"To do two things at once is to do neither."
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It's a great smackdown of multitasking, isn't it,
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often attributed to the Roman writer Publilius Syrus,
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although you know how these things are, he probably never said it.
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What I'm interested in, though, is -- is it true?
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I mean, it's obviously true for emailing at the dinner table
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or texting while driving or possibly for live tweeting at TED Talk, as well.
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But I'd like to argue that for an important kind of activity,
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doing two things at once -- or three or even four --
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is exactly what we should be aiming for.
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Look no further than Albert Einstein.
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In 1905, he published four remarkable scientific papers.
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One of them was on Brownian motion,
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it provided empirical evidence that atoms exist,
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and it laid out the basic mathematics behind most of financial economics.
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Another one was on the theory of special relativity.
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Another one was on the photoelectric effect,
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that's why solar panels work, it's a nice one.
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Gave him the Nobel prize for that one.
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And the fourth introduced an equation you might have heard of:
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E equals mc squared.
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So, tell me again how you shouldn't do several things at once.
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Now, obviously, working simultaneously
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on Brownian motion, special relativity and the photoelectric effect --
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it's not exactly the same kind of multitasking
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as Snapchatting while you're watching "Westworld."
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Very different.
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And Einstein, yeah, well, Einstein's -- he's Einstein,
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he's one of a kind, he's unique.
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But the pattern of behavior that Einstein was demonstrating,
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that's not unique at all.
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It's very common among highly creative people,
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both artists and scientists,
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and I'd like to give it a name:
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slow-motion multitasking.
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Slow-motion multitasking feels like a counterintuitive idea.
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What I'm describing here
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is having multiple projects on the go at the same time,
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and you move backwards and forwards between topics as the mood takes you,
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or as the situation demands.
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But the reason it seems counterintuitive
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is because we're used to lapsing into multitasking out of desperation.
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We're in a hurry, we want to do everything at once.
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If we were willing to slow multitasking down,
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we might find that it works quite brilliantly.
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Sixty years ago, a young psychologist by the name of Bernice Eiduson
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began a long research project
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into the personalities and the working habits
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of 40 leading scientists.
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Einstein was already dead,
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but four of her subjects won Nobel prizes,
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including Linus Pauling and Richard Feynman.
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The research went on for decades,
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in fact, it continued even after professor Eiduson herself had died.
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And one of the questions that it answered
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was, "How is it that some scientists are able to go on producing important work
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right through their lives?"
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What is it about these people?
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Is it their personality, is it their skill set,
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their daily routines, what?
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Well, a pattern that emerged was clear, and I think to some people surprising.
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The top scientists kept changing the subject.
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They would shift topics repeatedly
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during their first 100 published research papers.
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Do you want to guess how often?
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Three times?
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Five times?
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No. On average, the most enduringly creative scientists
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switched topics 43 times in their first 100 research papers.
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Seems that the secret to creativity is multitasking
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in slow motion.
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Eiduson's research suggests we need to reclaim multitasking
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and remind ourselves how powerful it can be.
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And she's not the only person to have found this.
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Different researchers,
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using different methods to study different highly creative people
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have found that very often they have multiple projects in progress
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at the same time,
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and they're also far more likely than most of us to have serious hobbies.
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Slow-motion multitasking among creative people is ubiquitous.
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So, why?
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I think there are three reasons.
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And the first is the simplest.
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Creativity often comes when you take an idea from its original context
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and you move it somewhere else.
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It's easier to think outside the box
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if you spend your time clambering from one box into another.
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For an example of this, consider the original eureka moment.
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Archimedes -- he's wrestling with a difficult problem.
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And he realizes, in a flash,
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he can solve it, using the displacement of water.
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And if you believe the story,
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this idea comes to him as he's taking a bath,
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lowering himself in, and he's watching the water level rise and fall.
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And if solving a problem while having a bath isn't multitasking,
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I don't know what is.
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The second reason that multitasking can work
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is that learning to do one thing well
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can often help you do something else.
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Any athlete can tell you about the benefits of cross-training.
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It's possible to cross-train your mind, too.
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A few years ago, researchers took 18 randomly chosen medical students
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and they enrolled them in a course at the Philadelphia Museum of Art,
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where they learned to criticize and analyze works of visual art.
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And at the end of the course,
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these students were compared with a control group
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of their fellow medical students.
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And the ones who had taken the art course
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had become substantially better at performing tasks
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such as diagnosing diseases of the eye by analyzing photographs.
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They'd become better eye doctors.
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So if we want to become better at what we do,
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maybe we should spend some time doing something else,
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even if the two fields appear to be as completely distinct
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as ophthalmology and the history of art.
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And if you'd like an example of this,
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should we go for a less intimidating example than Einstein? OK.
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Michael Crichton, creator of "Jurassic Park" and "E.R."
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So in the 1970s, he originally trained as a doctor,
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but then he wrote novels
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and he directed the original "Westworld" movie.
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But also, and this is less well-known,
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he also wrote nonfiction books,
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about art, about medicine, about computer programming.
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So in 1995, he enjoyed the fruits of all this variety
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by penning the world's most commercially successful book.
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And the world's most commercially successful TV series.
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And the world's most commercially successful movie.
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In 1996, he did it all over again.
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There's a third reason
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why slow-motion multitasking can help us solve problems.
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It can provide assistance when we're stuck.
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This can't happen in an instant.
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So, imagine that feeling of working on a crossword puzzle
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and you can't figure out the answer,
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and the reason you can't is because the wrong answer is stuck in your head.
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It's very easy -- just go and do something else.
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You know, switch topics, switch context,
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you'll forget the wrong answer
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and that gives the right answer space to pop into the front of your mind.
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But on the slower timescale that interests me,
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being stuck is a much more serious thing.
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You get turned down for funding.
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Your cell cultures won't grow, your rockets keep crashing.
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Nobody wants to publish you fantasy novel about a school for wizards.
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Or maybe you just can't find the solution to the problem that you're working on.
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And being stuck like that means stasis, stress,
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possibly even depression.
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But if you have another exciting, challenging project to work on,
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being stuck on one is just an opportunity to do something else.
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We could all get stuck sometimes, even Albert Einstein.
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Ten years after the original, miraculous year that I described,
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Einstein was putting together the pieces of his theory of general relativity,
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his greatest achievement.
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And he was exhausted.
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And so he turned to an easier problem.
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He proposed the stimulated emission of radiation.
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Which, as you may know, is the S in laser.
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So he's laying down the theoretical foundation for the laser beam,
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and then, while he's doing that,
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he moves back to general relativity, and he's refreshed.
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He sees what the theory implies --
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that the universe isn't static.
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It's expanding.
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It's an idea so staggering,
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Einstein can't bring himself to believe it for years.
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Look, if you get stuck
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and you get the ball rolling on laser beams,
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you're in pretty good shape.
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(Laughter)
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So, that's the case for slow-motion multitasking.
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And I'm not promising that it's going to turn you into Einstein.
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I'm not even promising it's going to turn you into Michael Crichton.
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But it is a powerful way to organize our creative lives.
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But there's a problem.
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How do we stop all of these projects becoming completely overwhelming?
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How do we keep all these ideas straight in our minds?
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Well, here's a simple solution, a practical solution
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from the great American choreographer, Twyla Tharp.
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Over the last few decades,
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she's blurred boundaries, mixed genres, won prizes,
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danced to the music of everybody, from Philip Glass to Billy Joel.
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She's written three books.
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I mean, she's a slow-motion multitasker, of course she is.
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She says, "You have to be all things.
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Why exclude?
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You have to be everything."
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And Tharp's method
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for preventing all of these different projects from becoming overwhelming
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is a simple one.
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She gives each project a big cardboard box,
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writes the name of the project on the side of the box.
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And into it, she tosses DVDs and books, magazine cuttings,
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theater programs, physical objects,
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really anything that's provided a source of creative inspiration.
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And she writes,
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"The box means I never have to worry about forgetting.
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One of the biggest fears for a creative person
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is that some brilliant idea will get lost
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because you didn't write it down and put it in a safe place.
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I don't worry about that.
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Because I know where to find it.
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It's all in the box."
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You can manage many ideas like this,
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either in physical boxes or in their digital equivalents.
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So, I would like to urge you
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to embrace the art of slow-motion multitasking.
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Not because you're in a hurry,
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but because you're in no hurry at all.
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And I want to give you one final example,
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my favorite example.
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Charles Darwin.
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A man whose slow-burning multitasking is so staggering,
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I need a diagram to explain it all to you.
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We know what Darwin was doing at different times,
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because the creativity researchers Howard Gruber and Sara Davis
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have analyzed his diaries and his notebooks.
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So, when he left school, age of 18,
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he was initially interested in two fields,
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zoology and geology.
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Pretty soon, he signed up to be the onboard naturalist on the "Beagle."
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This is the ship that eventually took five years
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to sail all the way around the southern oceans of the Earth,
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stopping at the Galápagos, passing through the Indian ocean.
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While he was on the "Beagle," he began researching coral reefs.
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This is a great synergy between his two interests
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in zoology and geology,
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and it starts to get him thinking about slow processes.
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But when he gets back from the voyage,
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his interests start to expand even further: psychology, botany;
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for the rest of his life,
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he's moving backwards and forwards between these different fields.
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He never quite abandons any of them.
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In 1837, he begins work on two very interesting projects.
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One of them: earthworms.
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The other, a little notebook which he titles
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"The transmutation of species."
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Then, Darwin starts studying my field, economics.
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He reads a book by the economist Thomas Malthus.
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And he has his eureka moment.
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In a flash, he realizes how species could emerge and evolve slowly,
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through this process of the survival of the fittest.
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It all comes to him, he writes it all down,
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every single important element of the theory of evolution,
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in that notebook.
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But then, a new project.
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His son William is born.
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Well, there's a natural experiment right there,
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you get to observe the development of a human infant.
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So immediately, Darwin starts making notes.
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Now, of course, he's still working on the theory of evolution
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and the development of the human infant.
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But during all of this,