While talking to a friend earlier this week, I realized that many of my best projects started out as what seemed like a distraction from more pressing work – ignoring my email inbox to read an interesting thread on Twitter or abandonning a work presentation for an hour to grab a coffee with a colleague.

These so-called distractions would plant the... See more

The mental states where new ideas can be born are hard to open up. And they are continually collapsing. The things you have to do to keep them from caving in will make people frown upon you—your tendency for isolation, working deep in the night, breaking norms. The zone is a place at the margin of society. But strangely enough, this fragile margin... See more