Pirke Avot: Order and Disorder

Services are conducted with dignity and precision. The rendition of the liturgy is smooth. Everything is present: decorum, voice, ceremony. But one thing is missing: Life. One knows in advance what will ensue. There will be no surprise, no adventure of the soul; there will be no sudden outburst of devotion. Nothing is going to happen to the soul. Nothing unpredictable must happen to the person who prays. He will attain no insight into the words he reads; he will attain no new perspective for the life he lives. Our motto is monotony. The fire has gone out of our worship. It is cold, stiff, and dead. True, things are happening; of course, not within prayer, but within the administration of the temples. Do we not establish new edifices all over the country? Yes, the edifices are growing. Yet, worship is decaying. Has the temple become the graveyard where prayer is buried? . . . . We have developed the habit of praying by proxy.

Heschel, Abraham Joshua. Man's Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism (Kindle Locations 1336-1343). Aurora Press, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Rav Simcha Zissel once went to visit his son Nachum Zev, then a student in a distant yeshiva. The first thing the father did was visit his son’s room. On inspection, he found the boy’s possessions in order. From this alone, he could tell that his son was doing well in the yeshiva. Only then did he go to see his son.

Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe says in the name of the Alter of Kelm that order can be compared to the clasp on a pearl necklace. The pearls are what make the necklace, and they are definitely more important than the clasp, but without the clasp the pearls will fall off and scatter, and all that will remain of the necklace is the string alone. Similarly, a person contains an abundance of strengths, intellect, character traits, and qualities. But without order, all these virtues will scatter, and he or she will be left with nothing.

Malcolm Gladwell: This I think is true, not just of writers, but of anyone who is in a creative space, that you have to reverse the normal human tendency, which is to edit. . . . A source of a great deal of frustration that exists between people in creative and non-creative universes is that creative people the brains of creative people are messy. Their imaginations are messy. Why, because they don’t want to throw anything out. Why don’t they want to throw anything out? Because they believe on some level that there is always something of interest or value in whatever they encounter. They know enough about how mysterious and serendipitous and unpredictable the creative process is that they realize that it’s dangerous to kind of make too hasty a judgment about the value of anything that they come across.

People in non-creative universes have exactly the opposite relationship to information—or to experiences is a better way of putting it. They’ll see something and they’ll say "Is it relevant to what I'm doing?" And if it’s not they should push it aside and focus on what they’re kind of task is. If you're at Proctor & Gamble and you’re the head of Ivory soap you’re job is to sell more soap and if you get distracted by some interesting, but ultimately marginal subsidiary issue you won’t sell as much soap. And that is an extreme example, but that's a world that demands focus. If you’re a surgeon and you’re operating you cannot let your imagination wander about some idiosyncrasy of the operation. You have to kind of zero in.