Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret to Greater Productivity

"The Art of Manliness" ^ | November 13, 2017 | Brett and Kate McKay |

[BenLurkin]

Location-Based Prompts

When Bell was on to some new idea and feeling a surge of inspiration, he could work with obsessive focus. “There is a sort of telephonic undercurrent going on [in my mind] all the while,” the inventor told his wife Mabel, explaining that he had “periods of restlessness when my brain is crowded with ideas tingling to my fingertips when I am excited and cannot stop for anybody.” During such times, Bell went without food or drink, and asked that no one, not even Mabel, disturb him, lest such interruptions burst the gossamer threads of his emerging ideas. “Thoughts,” Bell said, “are like the precious moments that fly past; once gone they can never be caught again.”

However, while Bell’s focus could be laser-like when he was chasing down a eureka moment, much of the time his mind was in fact quite scattered and distracted. While he liked to tinker and dream, he hated getting down to the brass tacks of experimentation; he detested dealing with details, the painstaking effort required to verify intuitions, the tedious process of making minute recalibrations, and then testing and re-resting variables. ...

Part of Bell’s difficulty buckling down also simply had to do with his resplendent imagination and wide-ranging curiosity. He was interested in so many different things that he had trouble thinking about a single idea for any span of time. His mind wished to jump from subject to subject and from observation to observation; he enjoyed reading through encyclopedia entries before going to bed, and carried around a pocket notebook to jot down his frequent and varied insights (he had a knack for finding inspiration in any setting).

[minnesota_bound]

My mind jumps from subject to subject and from observation to observation.

I am told I am daydreaming or goofing off.

[youngidiot]

Sounds like he suffered from the 80-HD

[wally_bert]

Same here.

[Grampa Dave]

Urban Dictionary: 80hd

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=80hd
Top Definition. 80HD.

Also known as AHDH for the illiterate and dyslexic. I can never pay attention in class, I think I have 80HD

[Wonder Warthog]

It is precisely the periods of “flightiness” that “loaded the fuel” for his periods of intense productivity. I’m no Alexander Graham Belle, but my career has also been successful due to “making connections that others cannot see”. Like Belle, I constantly study many seemingly disconnected subjects, but I have ALWAYS found that some useful idea simply “pops into my head”. I have never found any specific locations to be necessary to the process. The keys are 1) to read widely and deeply, 2) drop the area from study and go do something else, then 3) an answer to a problem “just appears”.

[Hazwaste]

Sounds like his mind was a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.

[moonhawk]

Maybe bi-polar as well?

[9422WMR]

Maybe bi-polar as well? :-(
Bi-polar is made up bullshit created in the 80’s.
More kids and adults have been screwed up by this made for marketing illness. Follow the money, it was created to market drugs.
It’s a destructive cycle, first the drugs, then the electroshock therapy when the drugs really screw up the brain.
And then you have a shell of a person who in the past was diagnosed with maybe hyper-activity. There are so many docs who should burn in Hell over their diagnosis of bi-polar nonsense.

[moonhawk]

Didn’t they used to call it manic-depressive? It’s different from ADD/ADHD, I thought.

Thanks for the heads up.