Slowness Is a Virtue

Summary

Modern culture is focused exclusively on questions that can be answered quickly.In academia, that’s what you can get funding for. Fast questions can be answered within a few weeks. You can then publish a paper. You can start collecting citations. You can present your answer at conferences. This is how you build a career.But the most important questions can’t be answered like that.When you can write down a step-by-step plan for how you’re going to answer a question or solve a specific problem, you aren’t doing research but development. Research means you only have a fuzzy idea of your destination but no clear idea of how you’re going to get there. You’re mostly just following hunches and intuitions. That’s how the biggest leaps forward are achieved.Development is the execution of a map toward a goal while research is the pursuit of a goal without a map.Working on questions you can answer fast means you know what you’re doing. And knowing what you’re doing is a sign you’re not pushing into genuinely new territory.Slowness allows for the exploration of uncharted territory and unexpected discoveries. Johann Friedrich Böttger spent almost a decade trying to find a formula that produces gold. While he never succeeded, a byproduct of his relentless experimentation was the discovery of a process to produce porcelain. Andrew Wiles worked in secret for 7 years on Fermat’s Last Theorem, publishing nothing. It took Einstein around ten years to write down the foundational equation of General Relativity. In this sense, when it comes to research, speed should be considered an anti-signal and slowness a virtue.Our very definition of intelligence encodes the bias toward speed. The modern definition of intelligence is extremely narrow. It simply describes the speed at which you can solve well-defined problems.Consider this: if you get access to an IQ test weeks in advance, you could slowly work through all the problems and memorize the solutions. The test would then score you as a ge...