A simple question: is your social media a comfort zone or a vegetative idle zone for you? And could they be awfully close to the same thing? How comfortable are you when you’re deep in your social media sites, publicizing your works, linking to your papers, sharing your thoughts? Are you comfortable? You better hope not because if you are, there’s a good chance that you’re awfully close to a vegetative idle zone.

Comfort zones are not creative places. Creativity needs an edge to it, a nervous tic. Oh sure, we’re all familiar with the thinking that to really work well we need a “quiet place, a place where we go to all the time to work.” And that’s fine. That’s situational comfort. Great. I’m talking about the psychological discomfort that can foster creativity. The itch we need to scratch with a keyboard.

So what gets you out of your vegetative idle zone? Is it a person you’re safe with and can throw around ideas without being brushed off? Perhaps it’s your home – you walk in, kick off your shoes and keep the world at bay as you madly create. Or what about your car – you’re by yourself listening to music – or the quiet – and just reveling in being with yourself and your ideas.

Perhaps your comfort zone isn’t a place or a thing at all but simply a state of mind – the state where you feel at peace, at harmony, wrapped in warmth and comfort and drift from idea to idea.

So what do we do? How can we get beyond a vegetative idle zone? Well first you have to recognize that it exists. Then you have to see the need to break out of it – and there’s always that need. What would the world be without the great ideas that came to us? What would we be without them? Then you have to want to break out of it. Get that? You have to want to break out of it enough to do it. Isn’t it time you wanted to?