The Power of Doing Nothing

An old crocodile was floating near the riverbank when a younger crocodile swam up beside him.

“I’ve heard a lot of people say you’re the fiercest hunter on this river. Please, teach me your techniques.”

Woken from his nap on a beautiful day, the old crocodile glanced at the young one with his reptilian eyes, said nothing, and dozed off again on the water.

Feeling let down and disrespected, the young crocodile swam upstream after some catfish, leaving a trail of bubbles behind him. “I’ll show him,” he muttered to himself.

At the end of the day, the young crocodile returned to the old one, who was still asleep, and began boasting about his successful hunt.

“I caught two meaty catfish today. What did you catch? Nothing? Maybe you’re not as strong as they say.” 

Unbothered, the old crocodile looked at the young one again, said nothing, closed his eyes and kept floating on the water as tiny freshwater fish swam gently among the algae on his belly.

Once again, the young crocodile was furious that he could not get any reaction from his elder, and for the second time he swam upstream to see what else he could catch.

After a few hours of hunting, he caught a small heron. Smiling, he held the heron in his jaws and swam back to the old crocodile, determined to show who the real hunter was.

As the young crocodile rounded the bend, he saw the old crocodile still floating in the same spot by the riverbank.

Something had changed, though: a huge wildebeest was enjoying an afternoon drink just a few metres from the old crocodile’s head.

In a lightning-fast move, the old crocodile lunged out of the water, clamped his jaws around the giant wildebeest and dragged it under.

Stunned, the young crocodile rose out of the water with the little bird still dangling from his mouth. He watched the old crocodile enjoying his 500 kg meal and asked:

“Please… tell me… how…. How did you do that?”

Looking over the wildebeest, the old crocodile finally replied:

“I did nothing.”

Doing matters more than boasting

When I first built JotForm, I was like the young crocodile, convinced that I always had to be doing something to get results.

Back then, if someone had told me I could achieve bigger results by doing nothing, I would have turned away and carried on grinding through 16-hour workdays.

I thought that to succeed, I had to keep building, working, growing and developing the next thing, whatever that “thing” was.

We all have a problem with busyness. But being busy and being successful do not go hand in hand. And I think that if we put “doing nothing” higher on our list of priorities, we might find ourselves catching more wildebeest than catfish.

That has been true for me, and I hope it will be true for you too.

But doing less, or nothing, is easier said than done, especially in a society steeped in extreme busyness. Let us take a closer look at our unhealthy obsession with being busy…

The “extreme busyness” epidemic

Humanity has wrestled with busyness since the very beginning, or at least since 425 BC, when Homer walked the Earth.

The Odyssey tells the story of the Lotus-Eaters, a strange people who lazed about all day, ate nothing but lotus flowers and did nothing at all. And, stranger than fiction, these people were content with their lives.

Homer wrote that after some of the sailors in Odysseus’s crew ate the Lotus-Eaters’ lotus (try saying that three times fast), they began to resemble the Lotus-Eaters: content, relaxed and a little apathetic.

Fearing that if his whole crew ate the lotus they would lose all motivation to return home, Odysseus ordered the affected men to be tied to the benches and made the ship set sail at once.

Interestingly, Odysseus’s reaction to this feeling of “doing nothing” sounds a lot like the company CEOs, start-up founders or school football coaches we know today: hard-work addicts who scorn anything that might hint at complacency.

Even though they sit at the tip of a much larger social iceberg, they still freeze in fear at the thought of doing nothing.

Today, the whole world measures worth in terms of busyness rather than the quality of work. In other words, it has become a status symbol: being “busy”.

How many times have you heard, or found yourself in, a conversation like this…

– How have you been lately, Mark?

– Oh man, I’m crazy busy!

– Great to hear, buddy. Keep it up!

We have unconsciously developed a way of measuring a person’s worth by the hours they work and how much is on their plate, regardless of whether they are running around like a headless chicken.

In his book The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss has fun with this idea, saying bluntly that if you want to get promoted, you should look busier by working longer hours, competing with everyone and constantly answering emails.

But sooner or later, we all have to ask ourselves: what is our mission? Is it to do the busiest work, or to have the greatest impact?

And when we look at some of the greatest minds on Earth, we find an interesting common thread: they all make time to do nothing.

The power of doing nothing

Carving out a period of your life to do nothing can be a challenge, especially during the working week, when we are thrown into countless meetings, notifications and ever-growing task lists.

Busy founders have started building so-called “Think Weeks” into their annual schedules: periods they set aside to read, think and live outside the packaged world of running their businesses.

While young founders such as Skillshare’s Mike Karnjanaprakorn have only recently started adopting the practice, as have big names such as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Ferriss, it was Bill Gates who first created the famous Think Week.

During his many years running Microsoft, Gates would retreat for week-long Think Weeks about twice a year: not holidays, but periods of genuinely doing nothing.

Gates was so firm about his Think Weeks that family, friends and even Microsoft employees were banned. Today, Gates credits much of Microsoft’s success to big ideas and concepts he happened upon while doing nothing.

Putting “doing nothing” into practice

You do not have to ban family and friends from your Think Week. Let me give you an example.

Every year, I take at least a week off, step away from my company and go back to my home town to help my parents harvest olives.

All thoughts of business growth or conversion rates disappear when you are picking olives. It is meditative and calming.

I know picking olives will not get me to the top of TechCrunch, but it is my own measure of personal success. Somehow, some of my best ideas tend to come during this time.

For those who cannot set aside a week a year to do nothing, I recommend a slightly different approach: observe a digital Sabbath.

On Saturday or Sunday, force yourself to stay away from all forms of technology, a practice known as the digital Sabbath.

Turn off your phone and hide it in the wardrobe. Close your laptop and shove it under the bed. And make every effort to avoid Netflix.

Give your brain room to think by stepping off the daily treadmill and doing nothing. Your mind will have time to collide with new ideas or to process old ones more deeply.

You may find success blossoming from practising like the old crocodile at the start of this article.

While we tell ourselves we can achieve more by elbowing our way through life, sometimes it is better simply to close our eyes and float.

And wait, until the wildebeest appears.

Source: tamlyhoctoipham

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