Chad Silverstein argues that just as designers leave white space on pages to rest the eye, people need intentional gaps in their days. He contrasts our packed schedules with Pascal's observation that humans struggle to sit alone and quiet, urging you to reclaim minutes for writing, thinking, and dreaming.
Chapters
If you read a book, any book, what you notice with the book is there's what on it when you open a page? Becoming built to lead. If we had it here, we could do it. What do you know what's on the page? In a book? In any book? I don't know. They're numbers. Numbers? Yes. What else? Words, Titles. Yes. Yeah. Headlines, subjects. Yeah, yeah, all that. And so the book designers, if they wanted to be efficient, would have designed it where a page in the book would have been filled, because you'd have to use less paper then to produce the book. Right. If it's really all that's on a page are numbers and words, sentences, paragraphs. Why not fill it up? Well, because back in the day, really, way back in the day, people had the foresight to realize that the eyes get tired quicker if I'm looking at nothing but data. So they've created margins top, bottom, left and right. And the book designers said, we're going to put words only in this little space inside the margins, but you'll leave white space so that there's something for the eyes to relax. And yet, how many humans fill their day up with no margin? Yeah, they fill it start to finish, and then. And they are privileged, unprivileged. Fill in the blank. So what I always tell my clients is, hey, when they tell me, I don't have time to do that chat, I've got to put food on the table. And I'm like, you have margin. You're swiping your phone. Is that putting food on the table? You're watching that television. For my older Clients, you're on YouTube. Are you learning or are you distracted? Throughout the history of time, people mostly live lives of distraction. Pascal said that they don't know how to stay quietly in the room alone. And so I just tell my clients, spend a little baby step a few minutes into your margin, into your room, and write, think, reflect, slow down about what do you want to dream about? Take a few minutes, doesn't take long.
