Name: Messy
Rating: 4.2 (123 reviews)
Author: Tim Harford

What’s in it for me? Learn to embrace messiness.

If someone tells you that your desk – or your life – is a mess, it's not usually meant as a compliment.

But as you'll learn from these blinks, there's nothing wrong with messiness. You'll find out how life’s little imperfections and ambiguities can boost your creativity – and why a tidy desk or a neatly organized schedule aren't nearly as helpful as you may think.

And you'll also discover

what’s great about being distractible;
how a truly terrible old piano helped a jazz musician to excel; and
how one chess player wins by confusing his opponents.

We try to quantify and impose order on the world, but this has its pitfalls.

Nowadays, everyone is talking about big data. Many hope that the proliferation of information will help us better predict future events like the rise of the Dow and the next torrential hurricane.

But the reality is, more data doesn’t always mean more accurate predictions. In fact, whenever you quantify something, you’re bound to pick up some random noise, such as errors in measurements. This poses problems for the big data approach since a model that takes into account all available information will suck up that noise, resulting in worse predictions.

Imagine you’re comparing the past lows and highs of the stock prices for two oil companies. Your predictions regarding the future prices of both stocks will probably be better if you cut out data from rare or unpredictable events, like a massive oil spill that sent one company’s stock plummeting.

Beyond that, the very act of measuring can distort the thing you’re attempting to measure. Take heart surgeons, for example. If they’re ranked by the number of successful surgeries they perform, some of them will naturally begin embellishing their numbers by hand-picking patients with the best prognoses.

Another human tendency is to prefer order over disorder. We like to see the world arranged into clear, predictable patterns. But actually, imposing order is not always beneficial.

Consider a 1990 Harvard study, where AnnaLee Saxenian compared two hubs of high-tech development, Route 128 in Massachusetts and California’s Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley came out on top, and the reason was its disorganized nature. Companies there let employees jump around from job to job and even allowed ideas and knowledge to be exchanged between firms. The result was a climate of cooperation that fostered innovation and made it easier to recruit experts, helping the entire area to prosper.

Meanwhile, the companies of Route 128 kept their businesses in neat little silos, walled off by legally binding non-compete contracts, which made it difficult for companies to react to new developments or to handle crises. As a result, the whole area suffered.

Disruptions and distractions prompt us to explore new avenues and get creative.

In 1975, jazz pianist Keith Jarrett played a concert that would go down in history. For this performance in Cologne, he used an old, virtually unplayable Bösendorfer piano – the only one available at the venue.

Jarrett couldn’t play the ancient piano like he would a new one. It was out of tune, too quiet, the pedals were sticky and the high notes had a tinny ring to them. So instead, he improvised.

The right workspace and network of people around you can enhance your creativity.

Paul Erdös, the genius Hungarian mathematician, was extremely grateful for the inspiration he found through working with different peers. There were years when he would creatively collaborate with a colleague every ten days or so and, on average, write a new paper with a complete stranger every six weeks!

It might seem like a frenetic pace, but Erdös was definitely onto something. Working with a wide range of people fosters creativity.

Daring to improvise can give you a serious competitive advantage.

Martin Luther King Jr. used to work on his famous speeches meticulously. But in 1955, when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat for a white passenger, King rushed to her aid with little time to prepare. He quickly organized a protest and improvised a speech, which was a huge success.

In fact, improvisation often promotes creativity. So how can you do it?

Too much automation and order can impede success.

How many of your friends’ phone numbers can you remember? Probably not many, because you’ve become reliant on your phone to store them.

People love this kind of automation, but one consequence is that we humans are becoming less skilled. There are many situations that we no longer need to handle ourselves, which is why we can’t manage them when we actually need to.

Key ideas in Messy