Paul Graham谈思考与创造的平衡

美国著名程序员、博客作者和技术作家保罗·格雷厄姆（Paul Graham）在其个人网站上的长文《How to do great work》给仍然雄心勃勃的年轻人提了一些建议，适合每位对自己仍有期望的朋友反复阅读。下面是本文的第七部分摘录：

Work doesn’t just happen when you’re trying to. There’s a kind of undirected thinking you do when walking or taking a shower or lying in bed that can be very powerful. By letting your mind wander a little, you’ll often solve problems you were unable to solve by frontal attack.

You have to be working hard in the normal way to benefit from this phenomenon, though. You can’t just walk around daydreaming. The daydreaming has to be interleaved with deliberate work that feeds it questions.

Everyone knows to avoid distractions at work, but it’s also important to avoid them in the other half of the cycle. When you let your mind wander, it wanders to whatever you care about most at that moment. So avoid the kind of distraction that pushes your work out of the top spot, or you’ll waste this valuable type of thinking on the distraction instead. (Exception: Don’t avoid love.)

工作不仅仅发生在努力工作的时候。当您散步、淋浴或躺在床上的时候，大脑也在进行一种非定向性的思考，这种思考过程可以非常有效果。通过让思维稍微游离一下，您经常能解决正面攻击无法解决的问题。

不过，要从这种现象中受益，您必须以正常的方式努力工作。您不能整天幻想着游荡。幻想必须与提出问题、补充思考的刻意工作交织在一起。

人人都知道工作时应该避免分心，但在思考的另一半周期中避免分心也同样重要。当您让思维游荡时，它会游荡到当时您最关心的东西上。因此，应避免那种让工作不再成为首要任务的分心事，否则您会将这种宝贵的思考浪费在分心事上。(例外：不要避开爱。)