Written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
"Glander best describes the notion of lifting all
inhibitions to “tinker
intellectually in an undirected stochastic process aiming at capturing some idea that will
enrich your corpus”. “Researching” or “thinking” smack of a top-down activity."
More on Glander by Taleb:
"It is an irony that the academy does not have a word for the process by which discovery works best –but slang does. I was trying to describe in a letter what I am currently doing: French would not let me. But argot lends itself very well... I am involved in an activity called “Glander”, more precisely “glandouiller”. It means “to idle”, though not “to be in a state of idleness” (it is an active verb). Gandouiller denotes enjoyment. The formal French word is “ne rien faire” (to do nothing), which misses on the active part –so do words that have a languishing connotation. Glander is what children without
soccer moms do when they are out of school. It resembles flâner which has this perambulation part; though Glander does not have any strings attached. The Italians have farniente but it is really doing nothing. Even the Arabs do not have a verb for Glander: the
construction takaslana from the Semitic root ksl denotes laziness (other words imply some inertia)."
Newton was a “glandeur”; In Dijksterhuis 2004:
George Spencer Brown has famously said about Sir Isaac Newton that “to arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of
contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not
calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is that one needs to know.”
I Glander whenever I am bored and I come up with some awesome ideas! Some of them are even viable product ideas which could be used to make major money.
