In a 2015 interview, David Ryan Polgar explains how busyness interferes with creativity:

We need to start viewing time for reflection as a necessity, not a luxury. Unfortunately, we often view the act of being intentionally creative as frivolous since we may not see instant results. Our obsession with milking each moment can sometimes get in the way of our creative process. The more we trust the process of allowing our brain to have occasional mental space, the more we are able to let go of our always-on tendencies.

One of the harder things we have to learn how to do is trust that our minds are actually creating things of value in these periods when it seems like we’re doing nothing. This can be frustrating (the great German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz complained about it, for example). But it’s essential to learn a measure of patience; to appreciate that you can be more creative in these moments of apparent idleness than in your conscious, driven hours; and, perhaps most important, that we can learn how to rest in ways that help us be more creative. (This is the whole point of my book!)

For example, the great scientist and double Nobel laureate Linus Pauling describes having realized that “I had been making use of my unconscious in a well-defined way,” when he fell into he habit of thinking about problems he was struggling with as he was going to bed. These often were problems he’d worked on for a while, and hadn’t yet been able to solve. “Some weeks or months might go by,” he said, “and then, suddenly, an idea that represented a solution to the problem or the germ of a solution to the problem would burst into my consciousness.”

I think that after this training the subconscious examined many ideas that entered my mind, and rejected those that had no interest in relation to the problem. Finally, after tens or hundreds of thousands of ideas had been examined in this way and rejected, another idea came along that was recognized by the unconscious as having some significant relation to the problem, and this idea and its relation to the problem were brought into the consciousness.

Likewise, in his memoirs the mathematician John Littlewood talked about how he overworked when he first arrived at Cambridge, had to learn that he would achieve more if he balanced work and rest, and eventually settled into a pattern in which he worked hard for several hours a day, went on long walks, and still became one of the century’s greatest and most prolific mathematicians.

The geneticist and Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock is another great example of someone who managed to learn how to harness her muse.

In the early 1940s McClintock was a visitor at Stanford University, trying to identify the chromosomes in the bread mold Neurospora. After a few fruitless days in the lab, McClintock went for a walk. “I sat out there, and I must have done this very intense, subconscious thinking” on the problem for half an hour, she later told her biographer Evelyn Fox Keller. Then, suddenly, she literally sees the solution. “I jumped up, I couldn’t wait to get back to the laboratory. I knew I was going to solve it– everything was going to be all right.”

McClintock had taken walks when working on tricky problems for years; but after that episode at Stanford, she reported being able to regularly use walking to get out of the lab and clear her head, confident that part of her mind would continue working on a problem– and often come up with an answer.

What do all three of these examples have in common?

First, it’s important to note is that “summoning the muse” isn’t a matter of just pushing a mental button; it’s actually not a simple thing at all. For McClintock, it required going on long walks (which was no hardship– she was pretty athletic); for Pauling, it required carrying problems as far as he could, then thinking about them before bed; for Littlewood, it required balancing his periods of work and rest. It’s like a ritual: you set the ground, prepare yourself to commune with the spirit– and then wait, and hope that the spirit decides to appear.

It’s also not something that any of them set out to learn. Clearly they learned how to do it, and were aware of the fact that they had learned, but it took time for them to come to realize that they had this ability.

But equally, their examples show that even if it’s not something they meant to learn, it is something that you can learn. You can learn how to practice deliberate rest, and to do so with the aim of learning how to work with your muse, to help it develop and grown, and to learn how you can call to it.

But you can only practice deliberate rest effectively if you have faith that you can reach their muse– that this apparently idle time is actually getting you somewhere. And as Polgar says, constant busyness gets in the way of being able to appreciate the value rest, and create value from it.