A shabby man named Estragon, sits near a tree at dusk and struggles to remove his boot.
He’s soon joined by his friend Vladimir, who reminds his anxious companion that they must wait here for someone called Godot.
So begins a vexing cycle in which the two debate when Godot will come, why they’re waiting, and whether they’re even at the right tree.
From here, Waiting for Godot only gets stranger - but it’s considered a play that changed the face of modern drama.
Written by Samuel Beckett between 1949 and 1955, it offers a simple but stirring question - what should the characters do?
Estragon: Don’t let's do anything.
It's safer.
Vladimir: Let’s wait and see what he says.
Estragon: Who?
Vladimir: Godot.
Estragon: Good idea.
Such cryptic dialogue and circular reasoning are key features of the Theatre of the Absurd, a movement which emerged after the Second World War and found artists struggling to find meaning in devastation.
The absurdists deconstructed plot, character and language to question their meaning and share their profound uncertainty on stage.
While this may sound grim, the absurd blends its hopelessness with humor.
This is reflected in Beckett’s unique approach to genre in Waiting for Godot, which he branded “a tragicomedy in two acts."
Tragically, the characters are locked in an existential conundrum: they wait in vain for an unknown figure to give them a sense of purpose, but their only sense of purpose comes from the act of waiting, While they wait, they sink into boredom, express religious dread and contemplate suicide.
But comically, there is a jagged humor to their predicament, which comes across in their language and movements.
Their interactions are filled with bizarre wordplay, repetition and double entendres, as well as physical clowning, singing and dancing, and frantically swapping their hats.
It’s often unclear whether the audience is supposed to laugh or cry - or whether Beckett saw any difference between the two.
Born in Dublin, Beckett studied English, French and Italian before moving to Paris, where he spent most of his life writing theatre, poetry and prose.
While Beckett had a lifelong love of language, he also made space for silence by incorporating gaps, pauses and moments of emptiness into his work.
This was a key feature of his trademark uneven tempo and black humor, which became popular throughout the Theatre of the Absurd.
He also cultivated a mysterious persona, and refused to confirm or deny any speculations about the meaning of his work.
This kept audiences guessing, increasing their fascination with his surreal worlds and enigmatic characters.
The lack of any clear meaning makes Godot endlessly open to interpretation.
Critics have offered countless readings of the play, resulting in a cycle of ambiguity and speculation that mirrors the plot of the drama itself.
It's been read as an allegory of the Cold War, the French Resistance, and Britain’s colonization of Ireland.
The dynamic of the two protagonists has also sparked intense debate.
They’ve been read as survivors of the apocalypse, an aging couple, two impotent friends, and even as personifications of Freud’s ego and id.
Famously, Beckett said the only thing he could be sure of was that Vladimir and Estragon were "wearing bowler hats."
Like the critical speculation and maddening plot, their language often goes in circles as the two bicker and banter, lose their train of thought, and pick up right where they left off: Vladimir: We could start all over again perhaps Estragon: That should be easy Vladimir: It’s the start that’s difficult Estragon: You can start from anything Vladimir: Yes, but you have to decide.
Beckett reminds us that just like our daily lives, the world onstage doesn’t always make sense.
It can explore both reality and illusion, the familiar and the strange.
And although a tidy narrative still appeals, the best theatre keeps us thinking – and waiting.
I published this article in the New York Times Modern Love column in January of this year.
"To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This."
And the article is about a psychological study designed to create romantic love in the laboratory, and my own experience trying the study myself one night last summer.
So the procedure is fairly simple: two strangers take turns asking each other 36 increasingly personal questions and then they stare into each other's eyes without speaking for four minutes.
So here are a couple of sample questions.
Number 12: If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
Number 28: When did you last cry in front of another person?
By yourself?
As you can see, they really do get more personal as they go along.
Number 30, I really like this one: Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things you might not say to someone you just met.
So when I first came across this study a few years earlier, one detail really stuck out to me, and that was the rumor that two of the participants had gotten married six months later, and they'd invited the entire lab to the ceremony.
So I was of course very skeptical about this process of just manufacturing romantic love, but of course I was intrigued.
And when I got the chance to try this study myself, with someone I knew but not particularly well, I wasn't expecting to fall in love.
But then we did, and -- (Laughter) And I thought it made a good story, so I sent it to the Modern Love column a few months later.
Now, this was published in January, and now it is August, so I'm guessing that some of you are probably wondering, are we still together?
And the reason I think you might be wondering this is because I have been asked this question again and again and again for the past seven months.
And this question is really what I want to talk about today.
But let's come back to it.
(Laughter) So the week before the article came out, I was very nervous.
I had been working on a book about love stories for the past few years, so I had gotten used to writing about my own experiences with romantic love on my blog.
But a blog post might get a couple hundred views at the most, and those were usually just my Facebook friends, and I figured my article in the New York Times would probably get a few thousand views.
And that felt like a lot of attention on a relatively new relationship.
But as it turned out, I had no idea.
So the article was published online on a Friday evening, and by Saturday, this had happened to the traffic on my blog.
And by Sunday, both the Today Show and Good Morning America had called.
Within a month, the article would receive over 8 million views, and I was, to say the least, underprepared for this sort of attention.
It's one thing to work up the confidence to write honestly about your experiences with love, but it is another thing to discover that your love life has made international news -- (Laughter) and to realize that people across the world are genuinely invested in the status of your new relationship.
(Laughter) And when people called or emailed, which they did every day for weeks, they always asked the same question first: are you guys still together?
In fact, as I was preparing this talk, I did a quick search of my email inbox for the phrase "Are you still together?"
and several messages popped up immediately.
They were from students and journalists and friendly strangers like this one.
I did radio interviews and they asked.
I even gave a talk, and one woman shouted up to the stage, "Hey Mandy, where's your boyfriend?"
And I promptly turned bright red.
I understand that this is part of the deal.
If you write about your relationship in an international newspaper, you should expect people to feel comfortable asking about it.
But I just wasn't prepared for the scope of the response.
The 36 questions seem to have taken on a life of their own.
In fact, the New York Times published a follow-up article for Valentine's Day, which featured readers' experiences of trying the study themselves, with varying degrees of success.
So my first impulse in the face of all of this attention was to become very protective of my own relationship.
I said no to every request for the two of us to do a media appearance together.
I turned down TV interviews, and I said no to every request for photos of the two us.
I think I was afraid that we would become inadvertent icons for the process of falling in love, a position I did not at all feel qualified for.
And I get it: people didn't just want to know if the study worked, they wanted to know if it really worked: that is, if it was capable of producing love that would last, not just a fling, but real love, sustainable love.
But this was a question I didn't feel capable of answering.
My own relationship was only a few months old, and I felt like people were asking the wrong question in the first place.
What would knowing whether or not we were still together really tell them?
If the answer was no, would it make the experience of doing these 36 questions any less worthwhile?
Dr. Arthur Aron first wrote about these questions in this study here in 1997, and here, the researcher's goal was not to produce romantic love.
Instead, they wanted to foster interpersonal closeness among college students, by using what Aron called "sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure."
Sounds romantic, doesn't it?
But the study did work.
The participants did feel closer after doing it, and several subsequent studies have also used Aron's fast friends protocol as a way to quickly create trust and intimacy between strangers.
They've used it between members of the police and members of community, and they've used it between people of opposing political ideologies.
The original version of the story, the one that I tried last summer, that pairs the personal questions with four minutes of eye contact, was referenced in this article, but unfortunately it was never published.
So a few months ago, I was giving a talk at a small liberal arts college, and a student came up to me afterwards and he said, kind of shyly, "So, I tried your study, and it didn't work."
He seemed a little mystified by this.
"You mean, you didn't fall in love with the person you did it with?"
I asked.
"Well..."
He paused.
"I think she just wants to be friends."
"But did you become better friends?"
I asked.
"Did you feel like you got to really know each other after doing the study?"
He nodded.
"So, then it worked," I said.
I don't think this is the answer he was looking for.
In fact, I don't think this is the answer that any of us are looking for when it comes to love.
I first came across this study when I was 29 and I was going through a really difficult breakup.
I had been in the relationship since I was 20, which was basically my entire adult life, and he was my first real love, and I had no idea how or if I could make a life without him.
So I turned to science.
I researched everything I could find about the science of romantic love, and I think I was hoping that it might somehow inoculate me from heartache.
I don't know if I realized this at the time -- I thought I was just doing research for this book I was writing -- but it seems really obvious in retrospect.
I hoped that if I armed myself with the knowledge of romantic love, I might never have to feel as terrible and lonely as I did then.
And all this knowledge has been useful in some ways.
I am more patient with love.
I am more relaxed.
I am more confident about asking for what I want.
But I can also see myself more clearly, and I can see that what I want is sometimes more than can reasonably be asked for.
What I want from love is a guarantee, not just that I am loved today and that I will be loved tomorrow, but that I will continue to be loved by the person I love indefinitely.
Maybe it's this possibility of a guarantee that people were really asking about when they wanted to know if we were still together.
So the story that the media told about the 36 questions was that there might be a shortcut to falling in love.
There might be a way to somehow mitigate some of the risk involved, and this is a very appealing story, because falling in love feels amazing, but it's also terrifying.
The moment you admit to loving someone, you admit to having a lot to lose, and it's true that these questions do provide a mechanism for getting to know someone quickly, which is also a mechanism for being known, and I think this is the thing that most of us really want from love: to be known, to be seen, to be understood.
But I think when it comes to love, we are too willing to accept the short version of the story.
The version of the story that asks, "Are you still together?"
and is content with a yes or no answer.
So rather than that question, I would propose we ask some more difficult questions, questions like: How do you decide who deserves your love and who does not?
How do you stay in love when things get difficult, and how do you know when to just cut and run?
How do you live with the doubt that inevitably creeps into every relationship, or even harder, how do you live with your partner's doubt?
I don't necessarily know the answers to these questions, but I think they're an important start at having a more thoughtful conversation about what it means to love someone.
So, if you want it, the short version of the story of my relationship is this: a year ago, an acquaintance and I did a study designed to create romantic love, and we fell in love, and we are still together, and I am so glad.
But falling in love is not the same thing as staying in love.
Falling in love is the easy part.
So at the end of my article, I wrote, "Love didn't happen to us.
We're in love because we each made the choice to be."
And I cringe a little when I read that now, not because it isn't true, but because at the time, I really hadn't considered everything that was contained in that choice.
I didn't consider how many times we would each have to make that choice, and how many times I will continue to have to make that choice without knowing whether or not he will always choose me.
I want it to be enough to have asked and answered 36 questions, and to have chosen to love someone so generous and kind and fun and to have broadcast that choice in the biggest newspaper in America.
But what I have done instead is turn my relationship into the kind of myth I don't quite believe in.
And what I want, what perhaps I will spend my life wanting, is for that myth to be true.
I want the happy ending implied by the title to my article, which is, incidentally, the only part of the article that I didn't actually write.
(Laughter) But what I have instead is the chance to make the choice to love someone, and the hope that he will choose to love me back, and it is terrifying, but that's the deal with love.
Thank you.
I wanted to just start by asking everyone a question: How many of you are completely comfortable with calling yourselves a leader?
I've asked that question all across the country, and everywhere I ask it, no matter where, there's a huge portion of the audience that won't put up their hand.
And I've come to realize that we have made leadership into something bigger than us; something beyond us.
We've made it about changing the world.
We've taken this title of "leader" and treat it as something that one day we're going to deserve.
But to give it to ourselves right now means a level of arrogance or cockiness that we're not comfortable with.
And I worry sometimes that we spend so much time celebrating amazing things that hardly anybody can do, that we've convinced ourselves those are the only things worth celebrating.
We start to devalue the things we can do every day, We take moments where we truly are a leader and we don't let ourselves take credit for it, or feel good about it.
I've been lucky enough over the last 10 years to work with amazing people who've helped me redefine leadership in a way that I think has made me happier.
With my short time today, I want to share with you the one story that is probably most responsible for that redefinition.
I went to a little school called Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick.
And on my last day there, a girl came up to me and said, "I remember the first time I met you."
And she told me a story that had happened four years earlier.
She said, "On the day before I started university, I was in the hotel room with my mom and dad, and I was so scared and so convinced that I couldn't do this, that I wasn't ready for university, that I just burst into tears.
My mom and dad were amazing.
They were like, "We know you're scared, but let's just go tomorrow, go to the first day, and if at any point you feel as if you can't do this, that's fine; tell us, and we'll take you home.
We love you no matter what.'"
She says, "So I went the next day.
I was in line for registration, and I looked around and just knew I couldn't do it; I wasn't ready.
I knew I had to quit.
I made that decision and as soon as I made it, an incredible feeling of peace came over me.
I turned to my mom and dad to tell them we needed to go home, and at that moment, you came out of the student union building wearing the stupidest hat I've ever seen in my life."
(Laughter) "It was awesome.
And you had a big sign promoting Shinerama," -- which is Students Fighting Cystic Fibrosis, a charity I've worked with for years -- "And you had a bucketful of lollipops.
You were handing the lollipops out to people in line, and talking about Shinerama.
All of the sudden, you got to me, and you just stopped.
And you stared.
It was creepy."
(Laughter) This girl knows what I'm talking about.
(Laughter) "Then you looked at the guy next to me, smiled, reached into your bucket, pulled out a lollipop, held it out to him and said, 'You need to give a lollipop to the beautiful woman next to you.'"
She said, "I've never seen anyone get more embarrassed faster in my life.
He turned beet red, he wouldn't even madeline68@example.org.
He just kind of held the lollipop out like this."
(Laughter) "I felt so bad for this dude that I took the lollipop.
As soon as I did, you got this incredibly severe look on your face, looked at my mom and dad and said, 'Look at that!
Look at that!
First day away from home, and already she's taking candy from a stranger?'"
(Laughter) She said, "Everybody lost it.
Twenty feet in every direction, everyone started to howl.
I know this is cheesy, and I don't know why I'm telling you this, but in that moment when everyone was laughing, I knew I shouldn't quit.
I knew I was where I was supposed to be; I knew I was home.
And I haven't spoken to you once in the four years since that day.
But I heard that you were leaving, and I had to come and tell you you've been an incredibly important person in my life.
I'm going to miss you.
Good luck."
And she walks away, and I'm flattened.
She gets six feet away, turns around, smiles and goes, "You should probably know this, too: I'm still dating that guy, four years later."
(Laughter) A year and a half after I moved to Toronto, I got an invitation to their wedding.
(Laughter) Here's the kicker: I don't remember that.
I have no recollection of that moment.
I've searched my memory banks, because that is funny and I should remember doing it and I don't.
That was such an eye-opening, transformative moment for me, to think that maybe the biggest impact I'd ever had on anyone's life, a moment that had a woman walk up to a stranger four years later and say, "You've been an important person in my life," was a moment that I didn't even remember.
How many of you guys have a lollipop moment, a moment where someone said or did something that you feel fundamentally made your life better?
All right.
How many of you have told that person they did it?
See, why not?
We celebrate birthdays, where all you have to do is not die for 365 days -- (Laughter) Yet we let people who have made our lives better walk around without knowing it.
Every single one of you has been the catalyst for a lollipop moment.
You've made someone's life better by something you said or did.
If you think you haven't, think of all the hands that didn't go up when I asked.
You're just one of the people who hasn't been told.
It's scary to think of ourselves as that powerful, frightening to think we can matter that much to other people.
As long as we make leadership something bigger than us, as long as we keep leadership beyond us and make it about changing the world, we give ourselves an excuse not to expect it every day, from ourselves and from each other.
Marianne Williamson said, "Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate.
[It] is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light and not our darkness that frightens us."
My call to action today is that we need to get over our fear of how extraordinarily powerful we can be in each other's lives.
We need to get over it so we can move beyond it, and our little brothers and sisters and one day our kids -- or our kids right now -- can watch and start to value the impact we can have on each other's lives, more than money and power and titles and influence.
We need to redefine leadership as being about lollipop moments -- how many of them we create, how many we acknowledge, how many of them we pay forward and how many we say thank you for.
Because we've made leadership about changing the world, and there is no world.
There's only six billion understandings of it.
And if you change one person's understanding of it, understanding of what they're capable of, understanding of how much people care about them, understanding of how powerful an agent for change they can be in this world, you've changed the whole thing.
And if we can understand leadership like that, I think if we can redefine leadership like that, I think we can change everything.
And it's a simple idea, but I don't think it's a small one.
I want to thank you so much for letting me share it with you today.
"To do two things at once is to do neither."
It's a great smackdown of multitasking, isn't it, often attributed to the Roman writer Publilius Syrus, although you know how these things are, he probably never said it.
What I'm interested in, though, is -- is it true?
I mean, it's obviously true for emailing at the dinner table or texting while driving or possibly for live tweeting at TED Talk, as well.
But I'd like to argue that for an important kind of activity, doing two things at once -- or three or even four -- is exactly what we should be aiming for.
Look no further than Albert Einstein.
In 1905, he published four remarkable scientific papers.
One of them was on Brownian motion, it provided empirical evidence that atoms exist, and it laid out the basic mathematics behind most of financial economics.
Another one was on the theory of special relativity.
Another one was on the photoelectric effect, that's why solar panels work, it's a nice one.
Gave him the Nobel prize for that one.
And the fourth introduced an equation you might have heard of: E equals mc squared.
So, tell me again how you shouldn't do several madeline68@example.org.
Now, obviously, working simultaneously on Brownian motion, special relativity and the photoelectric effect -- it's not exactly the same kind of multitasking as Snapchatting while you're watching "Westworld."
Very different.
And Einstein, yeah, well, Einstein's -- he's Einstein, he's one of a kind, he's unique.
But the pattern of behavior that Einstein was demonstrating, that's not madeline68@example.org.
It's very common among highly creative people, both artists and scientists, and I'd like to give it a name: slow-motion multitasking.
Slow-motion multitasking feels like a counterintuitive idea.
What I'm describing here is having multiple projects on the go at the same time, and you move backwards and forwards between topics as the mood takes you, or as the situation demands.
But the reason it seems counterintuitive is because we're used to lapsing into multitasking out of desperation.
We're in a hurry, we want to do madeline68@example.org.
If we were willing to slow multitasking down, we might find that it works quite brilliantly.
Sixty years ago, a young psychologist by the name of Bernice Eiduson began a long research project into the personalities and the working habits of 40 leading scientists.
Einstein was already dead, but four of her subjects won Nobel prizes, including Linus Pauling and Richard Feynman.
The research went on for decades, in fact, it continued even after professor Eiduson herself had died.
And one of the questions that it answered was, "How is it that some scientists are able to go on producing important work right through their lives?"
What is it about these people?
Is it their personality, is it their skill set, their daily routines, what?
Well, a pattern that emerged was clear, and I think to some people surprising.
The top scientists kept changing the subject.
They would shift topics repeatedly during their first 100 published research papers.
Do you want to guess how often?
Three times?
Five times?
No.
On average, the most enduringly creative scientists switched topics 43 times in their first 100 research papers.
Seems that the secret to creativity is multitasking in slow motion.
Eiduson's research suggests we need to reclaim multitasking and remind ourselves how powerful it can be.
And she's not the only person to have found this.
Different researchers, using different methods to study different highly creative people have found that very often they have multiple projects in progress at the same time, and they're also far more likely than most of us to have serious hobbies.
Slow-motion multitasking among creative people is ubiquitous.
So, why?
I think there are three reasons.
And the first is the simplest.
Creativity often comes when you take an idea from its original context and you move it somewhere else.
It's easier to think outside the box if you spend your time clambering from one box into another.
For an example of this, consider the original eureka moment.
Archimedes -- he's wrestling with a difficult problem.
And he realizes, in a flash, he can solve it, using the displacement of water.
And if you believe the story, this idea comes to him as he's taking a bath, lowering himself in, and he's watching the water level rise and fall.
And if solving a problem while having a bath isn't multitasking, I don't know what is.
The second reason that multitasking can work is that learning to do one thing well can often help you do something else.
Any athlete can tell you about the benefits of cross-training.
It's possible to cross-train your mind, too.
A few years ago, researchers took 18 randomly chosen medical students and they enrolled them in a course at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where they learned to criticize and analyze works of visual art.
And at the end of the course, these students were compared with a control group of their fellow medical students.
And the ones who had taken the art course had become substantially better at performing tasks such as diagnosing diseases of the eye by analyzing photographs.
They'd become better eye doctors.
So if we want to become better at what we do, maybe we should spend some time doing something else, even if the two fields appear to be as completely distinct as ophthalmology and the history of art.
And if you'd like an example of this, should we go for a less intimidating example than Einstein?
OK.
Michael Crichton, creator of "Jurassic Park" and "E.R."
So in the 1970s, he originally trained as a doctor, but then he wrote novels and he directed the original "Westworld" movie.
But also, and this is less well-known, he also wrote nonfiction books, about art, about medicine, about computer programming.
So in 1995, he enjoyed the fruits of all this variety by penning the world's most commercially successful book.
And the world's most commercially successful TV series.
And the world's most commercially successful movie.
In 1996, he did it all over again.
There's a third reason why slow-motion multitasking can help us solve problems.
It can provide assistance when we're stuck.
This can't happen in an instant.
So, imagine that feeling of working on a crossword puzzle and you can't figure out the answer, and the reason you can't is because the wrong answer is stuck in your head.
It's very easy -- just go and do something else.
You know, switch topics, switch context, you'll forget the wrong answer and that gives the right answer space to pop into the front of your mind.
But on the slower timescale that interests me, being stuck is a much more serious thing.
You get turned down for funding.
Your cell cultures won't grow, your rockets keep crashing.
Nobody wants to publish you fantasy novel about a school for wizards.
Or maybe you just can't find the solution to the problem that you're working on.
And being stuck like that means stasis, stress, possibly even depression.
But if you have another exciting, challenging project to work on, being stuck on one is just an opportunity to do something else.
We could all get stuck sometimes, even Albert Einstein.
Ten years after the original, miraculous year that I described, Einstein was putting together the pieces of his theory of general relativity, his greatest achievement.
And he was exhausted.
And so he turned to an easier problem.
He proposed the stimulated emission of radiation.
Which, as you may know, is the S in laser.
So he's laying down the theoretical foundation for the laser beam, and then, while he's doing that, he moves back to general relativity, and he's refreshed.
He sees what the theory implies -- that the universe isn't static.
It's expanding.
It's an idea so staggering, Einstein can't bring himself to believe it for years.
Look, if you get stuck and you get the ball rolling on laser beams, you're in pretty good shape.
(Laughter) So, that's the case for slow-motion multitasking.
And I'm not promising that it's going to turn you into Einstein.
I'm not even promising it's going to turn you into Michael Crichton.
But it is a powerful way to organize our creative lives.
But there's a problem.
How do we stop all of these projects becoming completely overwhelming?
How do we keep all these ideas straight in our minds?
Well, here's a simple solution, a practical solution from the great American choreographer, Twyla Tharp.
Over the last few decades, she's blurred boundaries, mixed genres, won prizes, danced to the music of everybody, from Philip Glass to Billy Joel.
She's written three books.
I mean, she's a slow-motion multitasker, of course she is.
She says, "You have to be all things.
Why exclude?
You have to be everything."
And Tharp's method for preventing all of these different projects from becoming overwhelming is a simple one.
She gives each project a big cardboard box, writes the name of the project on the side of the box.
And into it, she tosses DVDs and books, magazine cuttings, theater programs, physical objects, really anything that's provided a source of creative inspiration.
And she writes, "The box means I never have to worry about forgetting.
One of the biggest fears for a creative person is that some brilliant idea will get lost because you didn't write it down and put it in a safe place.
I don't worry about that.
Because I know where to find it.
It's all in the box."
You can manage many ideas like this, either in physical boxes or in their digital equivalents.
So, I would like to urge you to embrace the art of slow-motion multitasking.
Not because you're in a hurry, but because you're in no madeline68@example.org.
And I want to give you one final example, my favorite example.
Charles Darwin.
A man whose slow-burning multitasking is so staggering, I need a diagram to explain it all to you.
We know what Darwin was doing at different times, because the creativity researchers Howard Gruber and Sara Davis have analyzed his diaries and his notebooks.
So, when he left school, age of 18, he was initially interested in two fields, zoology and geology.
Pretty soon, he signed up to be the onboard naturalist on the "Beagle."
This is the ship that eventually took five years to sail all the way around the southern oceans of the Earth, stopping at the Galápagos, passing through the Indian ocean.
While he was on the "Beagle," he began researching coral reefs.
This is a great synergy between his two interests in zoology and geology, and it starts to get him thinking about slow processes.
But when he gets back from the voyage, his interests start to expand even further: psychology, botany; for the rest of his life, he's moving backwards and forwards between these different fields.
He never quite abandons any of them.
In 1837, he begins work on two very interesting projects.
One of them: earthworms.
The other, a little notebook which he titles "The transmutation of species."
Then, Darwin starts studying my field, economics.
He reads a book by the economist Thomas Malthus.
And he has his eureka moment.
In a flash, he realizes how species could emerge and evolve slowly, through this process of the survival of the fittest.
It all comes to him, he writes it all down, every single important element of the theory of evolution, in that notebook.
But then, a new project.
His son William is born.
Well, there's a natural experiment right there, you get to observe the development of a human infant.
So immediately, Darwin starts making notes.
Now, of course, he's still working on the theory of evolution and the development of the human infant.
But during all of this, he realizes he doesn't really know enough about taxonomy.
So he starts studying that.
And in the end, he spends eight years becoming the world's leading expert on barnacles.
Then, "Natural Selection."
A book that he's to continue working on for his entire life, he never finishes it.
"Origin of Species" is finally published 20 years after Darwin set out all the basic elements.
Then, the "Descent of Man," controversial book.
And then, the book about the development of the human infant.
The one that was inspired when he could see his son, William, crawling on the sitting room floor in front of him.
When the book was published, William was 37 years old.
And all this time, Darwin's working on earthworms.
He fills his billiard room with earthworms in pots, with glass covers.
He shines lights on them, to see if they'll respond.
He holds a hot poker next to them, to see if they move away.
He chews tobacco and -- (Blows) He blows on the earthworms to see if they have a sense of smell.
He even plays the bassoon at the earthworms.
I like to think of this great man when he's tired, he's stressed, he's anxious about the reception of his book "The Descent of Man."
You or I might log into Facebook or turn on the television.
Darwin would go into the billiard room to relax by studying the earthworms intensely.
And that's why it's appropriate that one of his last great works is the "Formation of Vegetable Mould Through The Action of Worms."
(Laughter) He worked upon that book for 44 years.
We don't live in the 19th century anymore.
I don't think any of us could sit on our creative or scientific projects for 44 years.
But we do have something to learn from the great slow-motion multitaskers.
From Einstein and Darwin to Michael Crichton and Twyla Tharp.
The modern world seems to present us with a choice.
If we're not going to fast-twitch from browser window to browser window, we have to live like a hermit, focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else.
I think that's a false dilemma.
We can make multitasking work for us, unleashing our natural creativity.
We just need to slow it down.
So ...
Make a list of your projects.
Put down your phone.
Pick up a couple of cardboard boxes.
And get to work.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)