Learn to Rest and Boost Creative Energy

Even a donkey knows enough to rest once in a while

You wouldn't attempt to raise a two hundred and ninety pound weight quickly over your head, unless you were a conditioned weight lifter. You'd soon be so tired (or injured) that you'd have immense trouble in picking up a rock that weighed but ninety pounds.

Anyone has mental collapses and emotional turmoil, because of too prolonged efforts on a task that's not moving toward a conclusion.

There's an old belief that there's something commendable in never giving up-once you've begun to solve a problem in a sure way. A well-known inventor in electronics, had a preferred outlook. He said, "There must be another way." To his personnel he says, "Don't waste a lot of time on a process that doesn't generate results. It normally costs less to try another way that might work better, than to keep forcing your way along a hard pathway, even though it might ultimately work."

President Coolidge was once asked just how it was that he had managed to run off so many of the troubles that inundated previous Presidents. Mr. Coolidge's typical answer was, "If I see any problem coming toward me, I just sit silent for a while. Nine times out of ten someone else will wind down and stop it before it gets to me."

This wasn't a lazy man's view, but that of an intelligent man who required his energy to be exhausted on those duties that he alone could do best.

Believe in other people and their abilities-Use their brains

Still another way of conserving your energy is to make use of the experience-and willingness-of those around you. Eight men can raise heavy beams all day without exhausting. While two men could carry the same load, during a full day four sets of two men would achieve far less than eight men working as a team- because the smaller groups would need to rest so often.

Over a given period, and in the right environment, eight men working in a study team can accomplish results that the same eight men working alone couldn't. More and more of the problems to be solved are so complicated that no single person working alone could perhaps succeed.

I once worked in a factory where the vice president opened all incoming mail. After reading the letters he handed them out to various people to handle. While the vice president was doing this clerical work, the working cost of producing the material we were selling had climbed to nearly double the quantity for which the product could be sold at a profit.

Don't work on the same problem too long at a time

Changing your work at intervals will conserve your energy, in fact requiring less to complete a given job. Most researchers like to have at least two or three projects under way at one time. Sometimes taking a break from one problem to focus on the other will allow the subconscious to come up with a solution to the first problem while working on the second. When their progress on one problem becomes too little, they'll switch to another job which has been "cooking" for a period of time. Scientists have told me that they almost always will find that they're now able to move much quicker on the previous problem. There are two good reasons for this accelerated progress. First, a different set of mental tools is called into action, and second, the processes of perception have been at work while the problem was being left alone.