“I worked on my PhD thesis in the 80s and I remember turning it in and I woke up the next morning and said, ‘actually, what am i going to do’?” because the last two or three years every morning when I woke up it was completely obvious what my task was supposed to be. So it was a little odd,and frankly sort of frightening.”

“what did you do?”

“I started thinking about all the things, now that I have time to do them — what should I do. You know my mom used to say that ‘boredom is the mother of invention’.I know there’s a lot of people who are too full of whatever life pumps you full of to sit around. If they don’t have tasks being given to them they’ll start thinking about something they would like to do. So that turned into a fairly productive time of my life.”