What if I told you some of Google’s billion-dollar products were born when employees were literally not doing their jobs? I’m serious. In the early 2000s, Larry Page and Sergey Brin rolled out this wild idea called “20% time.” One full paid day every week where you could drop your actual work and chase a passion project you believed could make the company better. Sounds like a holiday in disguise, right? But that’s how Gmail happened now over 1.8 billion users.

That’s how Google News happened. And AdSense? The ad platform that still prints over $100 billion a year also came from 20% time. Here’s the part most people don’t know: it started as an underground culture before it was policy. Engineers were already hacking side projects at night, and Larry made it official to protect those ideas from corporate politics. Managers hated it because it pulled people away from core tasks, but Larry and Sergey bet that hiring brilliant people and giving them freedom would bring exponential returns.

And yeah, most 20% projects failed but the ones that worked paid for every single flop thousands of times over. The entrepreneurial truth? Innovation rarely comes from the to-do list. Sometimes it comes from giving yourself or your team space to explore the unplanned. The lesson? If you want innovation, you have to give people permission and room to create it.