How To Stay In The Long Moment

In 1986, a Princeton mathematician named Andrew Wiles walked up the stairs to the attic of his house and effectively... disappeared.

He had decided to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, a problem that had defeated the best minds in the world for more than three hundred years. He told his wife and one colleague about the project and no one else. He stopped going to conferences. He set aside every other project he cared about. Then, he spent seven years alone in that attic doing work that no one was asking him to do, on a deadline that did not exist, with no evidence along the way that any of it was going to amount to anything.

He later described the work as entering a dark mansion. You walk into a room you cannot see and you bump into the furniture for six months. Slowly you learn where everything is, and eventually your hand finds the light switch and the room fills with light. You finally understand where you have been standing all that time. Then, you walk into the next room, and it's dark again.

In June of 1993 he stood up at a conference in Cambridge and announced that he had done it. It was front page news. Only, a few months later, a reviewer found a flaw in the proof.

Here's what's crazy: Wiles went back into the attic for another year, publicly, with the whole mathematical world watching and waiting for him to fail. He said it was the most painful stretch of his working life. But, in September of 1994 the answer finally came.

Seven years for the first version. One more year in the dark to finish it.

Of course, I am not telling you this so you will be inspired to go prove a theorem. I am telling you this because most of us would never even enter the attic.

Back in February I talked with Peter Schmidt, who studies what is happening to our attention, and he gave me a phrase I have not been able to shake. He calls it human fracking. The image comes straight out of the oil fields, where liquid is pumped into the ground to extract little bits of oil and natural gas that you simply can't access any other way. You fracture the rock into a thousand tiny fissures and pull from all of them at once.

That is what is being done to your attention, and it is why it never feels like theft. Nobody takes an hour from you. They take ninety seconds while the coffee brews. They take four minutes in line at the pharmacy. They take the eleven seconds between one thought and the next, when your hand reaches for your pocket before you have consciously decided anything.

At the end of the day you cannot point to what you lost. But you lost it.

What you lost is the long moment.

The short moment is fast and stimulating and it feels productive. Information goes in, sparks fly, and it feels like something is happening. The long moment is slower, and less comfortable, and considerably less fun. It is the third hour spent on a stubborn idea. It is the drive with no soundtrack. It is the walk where you do not listen to anything (including me.)

Here is what I have come to believe after twenty years of watching brilliant people work: Ideas of any consequence do not arrive in the short moment. They arrive in the long one because only the long moment gives those inputs time to collide. Steven Johnson called it "the slow hunch", or the season in which everything converges into a moment of clarity.

So here is my challenge for you this week, and it is small: Find one place where you would normally reach for stimulus, and do not reach.

The commute.

The dishes.

The fifteen minutes before your next meeting.

Instead of another podcast, put on instrumental music, or put on nothing at all. Let it be boring.

Boredom is not the absence of thought, it is often the beginning of one.

And when you are working on something and you feel that familiar pull to switch, stay ten minutes past the point where you want to leave. Ten minutes past comfortable is where the obvious answers run out and the interesting ones start.

Warning: you will not enjoy this at first. Your attention has been trained to expect a reward every ninety seconds, and it will complain loudly. Let it complain. You are not obligated to obey an impulse that somebody else installed in you for their own profit.

I have spent my career arguing that the great tragedy is not failure, it is unfinished brilliance. The best work of most people never gets out of them. and I no longer think that is mostly a talent problem, or even a courage problem.

I think a lot of it is simply that they never stayed with any idea long enough for it become anything.

Nobody is going to protect your long moments for you. There is an entire economy built on making sure you never have one.

Wiles spent eight years in a dark room feeling for a light switch. You are not being asked for eight years. You are being asked for an afternoon, and a little discomfort, and the willingness to sit with something that has not paid you back yet.

The room only lights up for the person who is standing in it. Be brave enough to stay in the long moment.

Have a great week!