Cool Down: Getting Further by Going Slower

Chapter 5. THE POWER OF THE BLUE SKY

To "blue-sky" means to stare out at the sky. Whether it is clear blue and featureless, whether there are clouds slowly passing by, or even if it is gray and overcast or black and starry, the sky offers a unique canvas upon which to rest your gaze. There is no need to focus hard, there are no distracting details, yet it's a visual scene of enormous potential.

The act of blue-skying is a powerful, creative intellectual undertaking. It allows the mind to work on problems, ideas, and opportunities that the busy-ness of the day-to-day tends to obscure. Blue-skying is one of the major benefits of slow, and therefore represents one of the major watersheds in any individual's destiny, since it is the act of blue-skying that allows people to do what needs to be done most: to continue to innovate and excel in a way that fosters ongoing growth and success. Some people have the time for this; most don't.

There is enormous value in taking your eyes away from work and focusing them on the sky, in the name of productivity, not of work avoidance. Leisure by itself is nice, and valuable, but the theme of this book is about using slow to get further ahead, which means, finding ways to advance, by taking time away from the momentum of "now," and applying it to the deeper possibilities of the future.

In Chapter 2, I described numerous examples and scenarios in which people feel the need to stay in the loop for fear of being left out. In Chapter 3, I introduced the ...