Why being a thinker takes quiet time | Hacker News Reader

Why being a thinker takes quiet time

cnn.com

176 pointstypicalrunt57 comments

Necessary reading material: "Solitude and Leadership" [0], an address by William Deresiewicz to the United States Military Academy that discusses the importance of forming your own ideas through careful reflection. As important to the task of creating something of quality on a computer as to becoming an upstanding military officer.

[0] http://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/

I'm speechless. Best essay I've read in a long time.

I'm posting this just to say thank you. I wouldn't have found this if not for your comment.

You're welcome! I'm glad whenever being broadly-read on the internet comes in handy, as it justifies the reading-broadly habit.

I'm trying to stop broad-reading so much, or at least do a less broad broad-reading. It's good to read other people aware of their broad-readness.

This is one of the reasons I love HN so much. Some people share really incredible things, which you wouldn't have found otherwise.

yes, simple things that are very important and related with our "normal life"

I'm just posting to say thank you (@hdivider) for expressing your opinion here - if not for your exuberant praise I think it unlikely I would have clicked this link in the middle of a comment thread.

I'm very glad that I found your praise and clicked the link. :)

Same here, thanks hdivider and asolove, that was a great read.

Wow! truly great to see so much love between HNers.

As a long time lurker (occasional commenter etc.) I immediately was reminded of this great essay as soon as I saw this current story.

Just in case you folks had not seen, the old discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1476425

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2110779

I really like the essay. However one thing to be noted, The author and even most of society expects you to achieve a higher goal, be successful. We raise kids to care about themselves, bless them to earn money and so on and that's fine.

But once they do become successful, we expect them to be a little giving, be less of a selfish person and help others. Unfortunately he/she was raised to be so self conceited, it would seem inane for them to be nice to others, stand up for others, and help them. Just dropping 2 cents from someone else that had a profound impact on me.

These two things don't seem to be that contradictory. You need to have some kind of success and resources to help more people in a meaningful way. It's not impossible for example the likes of Bill Gates etc who give away massive wealth towards causes they deem good.

No, I don't think the author does. About society I won't try to defend any opinion. The author would, I think, agree with me that the purpose of life is independent of "success" by any visible metric, and that a deep dedication to doing what is right comes in large part from not valuing success in and of itself. Better to be a lieutenant that does the right thing and reports war crimes violations than to keep silent and hope to be a General who can successfully change the system.

I'm a legs-up-on-table type of dreamer and thinker when I work. However, after working in corporate environments for many years I'm developing what can only been called a cognitive dissonance about this type of quiet thinking. The issue is that managers have always wanted me to track my time in 15-30 min increments, and there is never an expense category for "quiet thinking and reflection". Thus I've started to feel like a time thief [1] and it weighs on my conscience even though I know, deep down, that my quiet reflections are being used to solve difficult problems.

[1] http://timewellscheduled.com/time-theft/

File it under Analysis; which is exactly what you are doing.

Research and Concept Design can work too, who else has some good buzzwords?

Schedule a meeting for "ideating" with several other people who want to think quietly. Rotate whose project gets billed for the time.

Analysis done by applying a sophisticated large scale neural network containing modules trained on, among other things, problem-domain expertise, common sense heuristics, general reasoning, and hopefully just the right amount of temporary-absurdity-ignoring free-form concept generation.

"Time theft" is a term better reserved for systems that demand such a micro-accounting of your time per project without allowing for a good chunk to end up in an "admin/overhead category", especially if you're being paid hourly and billing a client. On-paper efficiency ends up looking great, but every employee is forced to choose between either shortchanging themselves or overbilling clients for quasi-focused time.

Considering how often the solution to a hard problem will suddenly appear after a good night's sleep, I wish I could bill clients for those eight hours! Or for time in the shower. . . . :-)

Well, you can.

You just have to bill them based on results (communicated as a set of benefits for them), not time.

I can't think of a better answer than "lie about it" and "let your results speak for themselves" ... which is not exactly a great position to be in

I've never been in such a position myself, but I have heard from more than one person whose boss more or less hinted that just making something up that has some vague relationship to real life is the de-facto expected behavior, because otherwise everyone would spend all their time filling in time-accounting sheets in 15-minute increments, and nothing would get done. So people ignore them until they have to turn some in, and then fill out two weeks' worth of accounting sheets based on a mixture of memory and making things up.

What I HATE is that we now have this "trend" -- or a bit of press based upon it -- from THE SAME institutions that foisted "veal pen", "collaborative" productivity upon us, for a couple of decades.

From one person who "saved the company", or certainly his department (and more), a couple of times, yet suffered mercilessly under a "cost cutting motivated", one-size-fits-all HR "best practices" promulgated reign of... "abuse", frankly:

FUCK YOU.

I can't read these articles without become incensed, because I sense that behind many of them are the same idiots who made life miserable.

AND... I suspect that "quiet time" will still remain the privilege and province of that minority of employee "who counts".

/rant

Sorry for the outburst. I need to take a break for a while.

To those who haven't become so bitter: An object lesson in the need to get out of miserable circumstances, before they get you.

As a Product Manager, I'm familiar with being on the other side of an outburst like this. I run a relaxed dev team with regular flexible hours, plenty of work-from-home, scheduled check ins and clear project timelines, with a sprint maybe at most twice a year lasting for 4-5 days maximum, and I still get these outbursts.

Im curious, because sometimes I think regardless of policy, some devs put mental pressure on themselves to the point of outburst and project it on policies or office issues or management. How much of this do you think is the policies you hate, and how much if it is your own internal struggle with what you'd rather be doing.

Reminds me of Hammock Driven Development by Rich Hickey: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc

First thing I thought of as well. Rich Hickey talks should be considered required viewing for anyone building non-trivial software.

Yes, great talk -- I was just about to post that link. For those who haven't seen it, definitely check it out.

Rich describes his design process and talks about how deep contemplation is a mechanism that transfers an idea from your conscious mind to your unconscious mind (your big brain) where the real horsepower is.

John Cleese also talks about this idea in his lecture on creativity (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VShmtsLhkQg).

In another talk Rich mentions that he has been able to spend a year in deep contemplation three times in his life: one was for Clojure, one was Datomic, and one other yet-to-be-named project.

BTW: You can tap into even more horsepower by pairing deep contemplation with a good night's sleep, where you go to sleep still thinking about the problem (Rich touches on this briefly).

Research shows sleep is when the brain prunes itself by separating signal from noise...

"Sleep researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health believe it is more evidence for their theory of 'synaptic homeostasis.' This is the idea that synapses grow stronger when we're awake as we learn and adapt to an ever-changing the environment, that sleep refreshes the brain by bringing synapses back to a lower level of strength. This is important because larger synapses consume a lot of energy, occupy more space and require more supplies, including the proteins examined in this study."

"Sleep — by allowing synaptic downscaling — saves energy, space and material, and clears away unnecessary 'noise' from the previous day, the researchers believe. The fresh brain is then ready to learn again in the morning" (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090402143455.ht...).

I'm still not sure how HN feels about these, but here's a shameless self-plug for my book on the topic of why and how people need quiet time to work well. It's focused on programmers, but is mostly applicable to everyone really: http://nightowlsbook.com

Also Paul Graham's essay about why you need long uninterrupted sessions to do anything serious is a good read on the topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

I think it was kind of silly for PG to suggest that a programmer's dislike of meetings is somehow greater than everyone else's. I've worked in several fields, I haven't met anyone that either liked meetings, or felt that they were productive enough to warrant the amount of time that the organization spent on them. I'm pretty sure that we all hate them equally. There is nothing special about programmers that makes them not like meetings more.

That being said, I agree that people involved in intellectually rigorous or highly technical work are probably affected more by any type of interruption than someone working on something more simplistic. So, perhaps the programmer's dislike of meetings is more legitimate, even if it isn't more intense.

I have spent more than a decade trying to solve a problem. I do day jobs and sometimes I take a few days off to work on the problem - in quiet contemplation. What I have noticed is that it has taken me more than ten years to 'see' a few important details pertinent to the whole.

I think that civilisation only moves on when society can afford a few people the time to think quite deeply about things, experiment with ideas and not have to worry too much about paying the bills. It is a pity that our education system does not inspire people to want to do this, spend as long as it takes working on something of e=mc2 splendour that will benefit the world. We cannot remember which of the ancient Greeks were rich but we do know their great thinkers. In the pecking order of 'fame', being a great thinker rules the roost.

Not really disagreeing with you but want to point out that Einstein had a very ordinary clerical job at the time when he figured out relativity. I even think the discussions with one of his colleagues played an important role.

I think many deep thinkers have previously been trust funded.

Yes, yes, detach yourself from your smartphone and cable tv and twitter sometimes. But do that on your own time! When you're on company time, let's squeeze 50 of you into this cramped open office plan seating arrangement. But don't worry, we'll add an air hockey table and a couple of pinball machines in there too to increase the company culture!

Oh technology industry, where did you go wrong?

I'd love to work somewhere with pinball machines. Sign me up!

The pinball machines are right behind you, but you've got a deadline to meet, and the guys from marketing have decided to have a competition before they leave early on a Friday afternoon. Enjoy!

Great read and I definitely agree. When people used to say: "I'm bored" you could suggest they do something productive, my generation never says that because of internet, tv and video games.

I say I'm bored all the time.

Just because I have something I could do (productive or not) doesn't mean I'm motivated to do it.

'I'm bored' doesn't mean you have nothing to do, it means you have nothing that is currently interesting to you. Telling me to something you deem productive is just going to make busy and bored, assuming I did it in the first place.

Agreed, boredom is such an over used term boredom as acute apathy and/or lack of novelty.

Narrated title. Went to post to a social network and realized the real title is "Why being a thinker means pocketing your smartphone"

No. When I submitted the article I copy-pasted the title from CNN into HN. CNN must have updated the article's title since then.

If the article is correct, then ironically, reading this article made me less creative.

But I certainly think there's something to be said for detaching from external stimuli and taking quiet time. Last weekend my phone ran out of batteries early in the afternoon and I was without internet/mobile until I got home late that night. I had all sorts of realizations about my area of work--things that I was looking to answers for externally but hadn't taken the time to process myself.

Well, you didn't get an opportunity to be creative while reading the article, but I don't think it made you "less creative". Both engagement and solitude are important - engagement to activate your imagination and solitude to provide the room to imagine.

The idea of a lone genius sitting in a room in isolation coming up with a brilliant idea seems to be a myth.

Most idea generation come from interaction with other people and finding different opportunities in putting together two disjoint ideas. This is how college campuses work and this is how tech areas, like Silicon Valley, work.

Yes, you need time to reflect on those ideas and maybe in quiet isolation. But you still need the data gathering.

Doesn't the research show that it's most effective to have people reflect, come up with ideas independently and then compare ideas, followed obviously by more reflection?

No one is saying collaboration is bad, just stressing that the reflection part can't be skipped. And in my experience it often is.

Yes, exactly. Also pointing to the fact that "this is how college campuses and Silicon Valley work" is not proof of anything, unfortunately. I worked in a huge open office before, as is fashionable at tech companies right now, and it was the ultimate worst. I've read research saying it wasn't just me, either; people are really hindered in overly-collaborative open office environments. Especially introverts-- which many of us are.

You need both. But the thing is, we're kind of crowding out our quiet time with a bazillion of electronic distractions.

What about, say, Isaac Newton? He invented calculus, but did not share the discovery for years, until after he'd used it to work out an entire theory of physics. He hardly collaborated with others and his ideas can hardly be considered anything but brilliant. How is this story mythical?

I could ask the same question about Einstein, Grothendieck, Ramanujan, or Perelman. Or in other areas than math/physics, there are people like Emily Dickinson, one of the greatest poets in history, who lived as a recluse. In philosophy, Kant and Nietzche are I think examples of relatively isolated thinkers - at least during some of their critical periods - who are standouts in their field.

Reminds me of this little ditty from the 1980's when phones were still decidedly dumb and - would you believe it - still wired. "You occupy your time with such silly things; do you have to go every time the phone rings". Sister Sledge, Reach Your Peak. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC5jeYEwbqU

Why does being a thinker take quiet time? The article never says, as far as I can tell.

The real reason is most likely because if things are too loud, then you get annoyed.

Well, it surely was lacking in the evidence department.

However, it certainly squares with my experience. Heck, I was up at 430am this morning, standing in my garage and giving an impromptu lecture to my clothes dryer about the math behind Kalman filters and Dempster-Shafer theory, because I had some ideas in my brain burning to get out, and talk out loud imaginary lectures do that for me (YMMV). Kind of hard to get that kind of solitude and privacy in a workplace where you have to measure every 15 minutes of productivity, or work in a open work space, or, you get the idea.

In case you want to put a name to this act, this is known as Rubber Ducking [1].

[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RubberDucking

Interesting, I find sometimes I have to dictate into a recorder app to get the ideas out best, I suppose those end up being said in a lecture style a lot of the time, but that had never occurred to me.

So you aren't alone in that habit. I find listening to those notes something I don't do quickly enough but the number of times I've listened to an old one and heard myself say "... Have to watch out for X I suppose, anyway..." where X is a problem/bug that showed up later and was hard to track down has convinced me this can be a really useful exercise.

Totally agree with the article, but not the title: one does not need to "be a thinker" to think; anyone can think if they try (in silence and isolation).

The best ideas very rarely come from professional "thinkers".

I need to sit down and think quietly for myself whenever I design the public portion of a class.

Or any REST api (which is sorta the public portion of a class exposed over HTTP I guess).

Totally agree with this.

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