What do you think about in the shower?

The brain is a funny thing.

When I’m working on a particularly recalcitrant architectural problem, I like to load my mind with all the factors involved, then give myself the mental command to work it out while I work away on other things—confident that the creative part of the brain will “pop out” the solution when I’m not looking.  It’s a bit like throwing a whole bunch of balls up in the air, then going away and coming back only once you hear them land—and as long as you’ve first made sure you’ve got all the important balls, it works very well.

Now oddly enough, it’s not uncommon that the most important balls start to land when I’m in the shower (which is probably an unfortunate combination of metaphor and image, but I can’t really help that.) Which is why this piece struck me this morning once I was out of the shower: how what you think about in the shower in the morning is more important than you think:.

I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.
    “Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There's a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I'm increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control it indirectly…. ”

Read The Top Idea in Your Mind by Paul Graham. [Hat tip Thrutch]