On rest, ideas, and the radical act of doing what brings you joy.
We’ve talked about the reshuffle. We’ve talked about AI as a scaffold, a tool, an equalizer. We’ve established that you are not behind and that your ideas deserve to exist.
But here’s the question that may keep you up at night or at least enters your thoughts closer to New Year’s Eve:
What do you actually want?
Not only what you’re good at. Not what pays the bills. Not what you’ve always done or what the market says is smart right now. What do you want? The the full, unhinged, unoptimized version of you that finally has the space to want something.
Because if the belief is that AI is going to liberate us from the shackles of all the mundane and soul sucking work that we don’t enjoy then we have a responsibility take up space where we do love to exist. And most of us have been so busy for so long that we may have genuinely forgotten.
This final article is about being open to rest in order to get clear. The coming back to yourself. The permission to rest, to play, to learn something just because it delights you, and to let your real life be a source of ideas rather than an obstacle to them.
Part 1: The Science of Slowing Down
Here’s something neuroscience has been trying to tell us for years:
Your best ideas do not arrive when you are grinding. They arrive in the shower. On a walk. In the in-between that slow, quiet space between doing and not-doing. The space between the notes of music, between the thoughts in meditation, or between waking out of a dream or sleep and there is a reason for this.
Your brain has a network called the Default Mode Network, the DMN, that activates not when you’re focused, but when you’re not. When the mind is allowed to idle and drift, the DMN gives rise to ideas that other, more task-focused networks then vet and develop further. Research shows that activation of the DMN during breaks is associated with enhanced creativity, problem-solving, and insight. Stepping away from a problem and allowing the mind to wander can lead to breakthroughs that structured thinking simply cannot achieve. And it’s a process researchers call incubation.
In other words: rest is not the opposite of productivity. Rest is where the good stuff gets made.
My favorite example of this is in 2008, Lin-Manuel Miranda was 28 years old and exhausted after seven years of working to bring his musical In the Heights to Broadway. When it finally opened, he took a vacation and picked up Ron Chernow’s 800-page biography of Alexander Hamilton at the airport and headed to a resort in Mexico. Before he finished the second chapter, something clicked. He recognized that Hamilton, an orphaned immigrant who wrote his way off a Caribbean island, clawed into rooms he had no business being in, and helped build a new nation with nothing but his words was THEE hip-hop narrative. “How has no one done this?” he said. He Googled it, found no one had, and got to work.
Eleven Tony Awards later, he said it plainly: “The moment my brain got a moment’s rest, Hamilton walked into it. It’s no accident that the best idea I’ve ever had in my life came to me on vacation.”
Not in a brainstorming session. Not during a productivity sprint. In a hammock. When he finally stopped.
I have a poll up right now asking the question: What do you need permission to do most right now? and “Rest without guilt” is leading with 75% of the vote. The guilt you feel when you rest is not a moral signal. It is a conditioned response. What happens when you spend years in systems that rewarded busyness as identity and productivity and treated stillness as laziness. People who spent time doing leisure activities experienced measurably less stress, lower heart rates, and greater calm than when they were not doing those activities. Research tracking more than 93,000 people across the United States, Japan, China, and 13 European nations found that those with hobbies reported fewer symptoms of depression and greater health, happiness, and life satisfaction and the specific pastime mattered less than the engagement itself.
You don’t need to find the perfect hobby or even be the best at it. You just have to show up for something that isn’t work and let your brain do what it has been waiting to do.
Part 2: The Idea That Is Looking For You
Elizabeth Gilbert, in her book Big Magic, makes an argument that sounds mystical until you sit with it long enough and realize it is the most practical thing you’ve ever heard.
She believes our world is inhabited not just by people and living things, but by ideas. Ideas are a un-embodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us but capable of interacting with us. They have no material body but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be birthed is through collaboration with a human partner. I’ll say it louder for the folks in the back: It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the material world.
Ideas are looking for people to carry them out.
Not the most qualified person. Not the most credentialed or most resourced or most ready. Ideas spend eternity swirling around us, searching for available and willing human partners.
How many of you have felt that? The idea you kept meaning to start. The thing you’ve been circling for years: the product, the program, the book, the business, the community, the conversation. The thing that keeps showing back up no matter how many times you tell it not now, not yet, I’m not ready.
That nagging is not random. That is the idea knocking.
And what Hamilton and Gilbert and the neuroscience of the Default Mode Network are all saying is the same thing: the idea needs you to slow down enough to hear it.
When you say yes to an idea, you enter into a contract with inspiration, and your job becomes both simple and difficult: you must try to see it through, all the way to its impossible-to-predict outcome.
You don’t have to know the outcome. You don’t have to have it all figured out. You just have to say yes — and begin.
So let me ask you directly:
Is there something you’d like to see in the world?
No matter how small or big. How unfinished or unsure. How long it’s been sitting in the back of your mind waiting for a right time that never quite arrives. What if the right time is the one where you finally rest enough to hear it?
Part 3: Now Design It…On Your Own Terms
Here is what this moment is actually offering, underneath all the disruption and noise and headlines about what AI is taking away:
A genuine opening.
Whether you are holding a pink slip right now, or you’ve been quietly knowing for a while that it’s time to make a leap, or you’re simply sitting with the low hum of something has to change…this is not a crisis. This is an invitation. The old way of doing something does not only mean loss. It also means space. And space, if you’re paying attention, is where everything new begins and it necessary to birth a new idea.
The question is no longer just what do I do next? The question is who do I want to be, and what do I want to build?
This is where AI enters not as the thing that may feel like it’s displacing you, but as the tool that can help you build what’s next. Not the AI that corporations use to cut headcount while protecting shareholder value. The other version…the equalizer version. The one that compresses the distance between your idea and its existence in the world.
Your perspective. Your story. Your understanding of the problem worth solving and the people worth solving it for. Your ethics, your values, your willingness to stay in it when it gets hard. None of that lives in a model. It lives in you. Join me if this series landed for you and you’re ready for the conversation — Pink Slip to Permission Slip is happening on June 11th at 11am PT. One hour. It will be recorded so register to get the recording.
🔗 Link to register here. Bring someone who needs it.
Sources
Psychology Today. Default Mode Network. psychologytoday.com
Kühn et al. (2014); Baird et al. (2012). DMN activation, creativity, and insight. ResearchGate
Ramsøy, T. (2024). Creativity, Mind-Wandering, and the Default Mode Network. thomasramsoy.com
Miranda, L. (2008–2015). Hamilton origin story. Hollywood Reporter / Inc. / Britannica
Gilbert, E. (2015). Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. Riverhead Books
UC Merced (2015). Leisure activities and wellbeing. Asian Efficiency
National Geographic (2025). Why having a hobby is good for your brain and body. nationalgeographic.com
Petrou, P. et al. (2026). Leisure crafting, creativity, and meaning at work. Human Relations
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