Ennui

It's 3 am. I have a presentation tomorrow morning and I still have a mammoth job to finish. In the midst of thinking about how much work is left, I have already reached that stage of exhaustion where one can't even sleep. And suddenly out of sheer laziness I start to think of an 'innovative' way to wiggle my way out of the work I haven't done.

My MBA nurtured this streak in me - the quality of being able to save my skin. I call it innovation. I have somehow come to believe that a lot of innovation stems from downright laziness. Research, rationale, pragmatism - basically all that society has conditioned us lesser mortals to inculcate in ourselves- just clogs our minds, limits our perspective and forces us to think within a certain parameter. We are taught to think in a specific way and this is force fed into our system bit by bit.
 
On the other hand, ideas that stem from utter desperation to just save your posterior, somehow, turn out to be truly ingenious. In college too, uncannily, the best presentations, reports, projects etc. that I made, were the ones that were completed in the nick of time. By divine grace everything came together at the last minute, with me spitting out brilliant, original, out-of-the-box ideas.

I think I just end up spending a lot of time planning each and every activity and I do not plan enough time to actually do it- so then again here I am sitting down one fine day...night...early morning...when my boss has lost all hope of me being able to come up with a below the line marketing campaign and then...a flash of lightning later (more a flicker of a tube light later but I like to be melodramatic!) I have a campaign that I can be proud of. 

Moral of the story: Adrenaline rushes...pressures...deadlines...laziness... - true innovation germinates from these.