Take Time To Try

               Out of all the things I read and watched this week, the most impactful to me was the video, License to Pursue Dreams.  This video is a brief clip from Marissa Mayer who is basically just a big boss at google.  She discusses how at google, they allow their employees to spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want to work on.  The biggest point she made was that out of all the google project launches of the last six months at the time of this speech, 50% of them stemmed from this 20% of free work time.  Thinking about that, it’s incredible that one fifth of the work-hours at google produced one half of their products that made it to market.  She specifically says that “it turns out when you take really smart people and give them really good tools, they build really beautiful amazing things that are really exciting”. 

Now, I’m not saying that every business should pay their employees one day every week to watch Netflix or anything like that.  I’m not even saying that you should pay them one day a week to be at work and do whatever they want.  What I AM saying is that we need to take some time to pursue our own interests.  If we work 20% of our time, or even just 15% of a year, a week  or even a day, then we will see incredible results.  We don’t have to measure it, but we have to put effort into it.  We need to take time out to work on what we want to work on.  We don’t need to take this time to chill or relax, but to work on something productive that is our very own.  This is what will bring us a huge portion of our effective creative output.