Cal Newport's Blog, page 45

From Obscurity to Genius: The Deep Life of Yitang Zhang

Bound Gaps Solved

Last year, Yitang (Tom) Zhang published a paper in the Annals of Mathematics titled “Bounded Gaps Between Primes.” The abstract for the paper is simple enough for a non-mathematician to understand. It states that there are infinitely many pairs of consecutive prime numbers that are no more than 70,000,000 apart.

Don’t let the simplicity of the claim fool you: people have being trying to prove something like this for over 150 years.

At the time when Zhang submitted his result he held a “tenuous” temporary position in the mathematics department at the University of New Hampshire. As reported in Alec Wilkinson’s elegant New Yorker profile, before a friend set Zhang up with the New Hampshire position, he bounced around odd jobs, including a stint keeping the books at a Subway franchise.

Soon after his result was published, everything changed. His employer (wisely and with haste) made him a professor. He was invited to spend six months at the Institute for Advanced Study and accepted lecture invitations across the country. That same year, he was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” grant.

What caught my attention about Zhang, however, was not the elegance of his result (which, as a lowly applied mathematician, I cannot come close to understanding) but the elegance of his work habits.

A Deep Life

Zhang began to work on bound gaps (as it’s often called) in 2010. He didn’t find his “door” into the problem until the summer of 2012, when, standing in a friend’s backyard in Colorado, smoking a cigarette and watching for deer, he finally saw a way to penetrate its knotty interior.

In that two year period, between when Zhang started on the problem and had his first breakthrough, he spent much of his waking life simply thinking. Here’s Wilkinson’s description of Zhang’s “method”:

A few years ago, Zhang sold his car, because he didn’t really use it. He rents an apartment about four miles from campus and rides to and from his office with students on a school shuttle. He says that he sits on the bus and thinks. Seven days a week, he arrives at his office around eight or nine and stays until six or seven. The longest he has taken off from thinking is two weeks. Sometimes he wakes in the morning thinking of a math problem he had been considering when he fell asleep. Outside his office is a long corridor that he likes to walk up and down. Otherwise, he walks outside.

I don’t have a piece of pragmatic advice to extract from this story. Most people cannot spend two years thinking about the same thing for ten hours a day, and it wouldn’t help their professional life much if they did.

But I think Zhang’s story highlights the beauty and potential of a mind left to do nothing but think without interruption at its highest capacity…

(Photo from the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)

Isaac Asimov’s Advice for Being Creative (Hint: Don’t Brainstorm)

Asimov’s Lost Essay

In the late 1950’s, Arthur Obermayer worked for Allied Research Associates, a cold war-era science lab. During this period, his employer received a grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency to “elicit the most creative approaches possible for a ballistic missile defense system.”

Obermayer was a longtime friend of the famed science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Figuring that Asimov might know a thing or two about creativity, he brought him into the project.

The result was an essay, penned by Asimov, on the topic of creative breakthroughs. Oberymayer recently brought this essay to the attention of the MIT Technology Review magazine, which reprinted it in full.

The piece contains several original notions, but what caught my attention was its take on where creative ideas come from.

The Creativity of One

Every since ad man Alex Osborn introduced the brainstorming technique in the early 1940’s, creativity has been sold as a collaborative process. This is a big part of the reason, for example, why Facebook is creating the world’s largest open office in its new headquarters — people need to serendipitously bounce ideas off of each other to stumble onto breakthroughs.

Asimov disagrees:

My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. The creative person is, in any case, continually working at it. His mind is shuffling his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it.

To have people sit in a room and jot ideas on butcher paper, or to chat idly at their open office work tables, in other words, is not likely to generate deep insight.

Indeed, such collaboration can even hurt this goal:

The presence of others can only inhibit this process, since creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.

This doesn’t mean, however, that bringing creative people together is worthless. As Asimov elaborates, group meetings, if kept small (he estimates five people as an ideal size), do have a use.

Just not the one we’re used to hearing.

The goal for creative meetings is not to come up with new ideas, he argues, but instead to transfer the raw material for these ideas between participants. As Asimov explains: “No two people exactly duplicate each others’ mental stores of items.”

The goal of collaboration, in other words, is to quickly increase the store of material that the creative can then work with once returned to his or her isolated cogitation.

As someone who makes a living on creative insights (how else to describe proof solving), I’m sympathetic to Asimov’s take. While group activities like brainstorming might be useful for lightweight projects, like coming up with a new slogan for an advertisement, if you’re instead trying to solve an unsolved proof, or, more pressingly, improve ballistic missile defense, there’s no way to avoid learning hard things and then thinking hard about what you learned, hoping to tease out a new connection.

This is fundamentally a deep process — one that no amount of brainstorming sessions or distracting open office spaces can short circuit.

(Photo by Firas Wehbe)

Deep Habits: Think Hard Outside The Office

Deep Work After Hours

One lesson I learned after becoming a professor is that producing intellectual insights at a professional pace requires deep thinking beyond the confines of the normal workday. Though I’m quite good at protecting and prioritizing deep work against the encroachment of the shallow, the depth I can fit into my regular schedule is not sufficient.

My strategy is to maintain, at all times, a single, clear problem primed and ready for cogitation. I then set aside specific times for this deep thinking in my schedule outside work. I use many (though not all) of my commutes for this purpose. I also leverage long weekend dog walks and the mental lull that accompanies time-consuming house work.

(People sometimes ask what I do with the free time I preserve by not using any social media or web surfing. This is a large part of my answer.)

Quality Over Quantity

This habits adds an additional half dozen hours (on average) of deep thinking to my week. This might not seem like a lot, but more important than the number of hours gained is their quality.

Because this deep thinking is freed from the context of an otherwise draining workday, I can often muster more mental energy than, say, at 3:00 on a Thursday afternoon.

Another advantage is that these blocks are short. This allows me to make many fresh attacks on a problem, which is generally more likely to generate a breakthrough than combining that time into one long slog.

Caveat Emptor

A word of warning concerning this approach is that there is significant difference between having a primed undecidable task to work on after hours, and just letting your normal, shallow obligations bleed into your evenings and weekends.

The former can be invigorating while the latter is draining and often devolves into stressful workaholism.

Put another way, I think fixed-schedule productivity and work shutdown routines (and all the benefits they bestow) are fully compatible with this habit — at least, in my experience.

This being said, this habit is not always innocuous. It’s easy sometimes for it to get out of hand.

For example, sometimes, when I get close to a solution, I get a little obsessive in my thinking and it bleeds into whatever else the family is doing: at which point it becomes noticeable (and annoying) to those around me. If I spend more than a day or two in this state, I will burn out — which isn’t pleasant.

But usually, this extracurricular contemplation remains well-contained.

Bottom Line

To conclude, I’m not sure if this approach generalizes much beyond the weird world I live in where people pay me to prove things (though I suspect it does). But at the very least, it provides some insight into the often grinding (and occasionally exhilarating) pursuit of a career in the world of professional thinking.

Many Senators Don’t Use E-mail. This Shouldn’t Bother You.

Redeeming The Luddite Caucus

Earlier this morning I was reading The Washington Post while watching the sun rise (I have two young kids at home: I find quiet where I can). A column by Catherine Rampell, titled The Luddite Caucus, caught my attention.

As I began to read, my interest transformed into concern.

In the wake of the recent Hillary Clinton e-mail story, many reporters, it turns out, have been asking other politicians about their digital habits. After reviewing these articles, Rampell reports that there are a surprising number of United States senators who rarely use e-mail — a list that includes: Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Pat Roberts, Richard Shelby, Orrin Hatch, and Chuck Schumer.

Rampell is shocked that so many senators “proudly abstain” from e-mail.

She accuses them of being “utterly uninterested” in “understanding the daily experience, workplace expectations or priorities of their younger constituents.”

She describes the senators as displaying “mindboggling levels of societal incuriosity,” to the point that this behavior should be considered “political malpractice.”

She concludes by asserting that contemporary technology use is a “necessary” condition for understanding “good tech policy”, rendering these senators unqualified to address laws that affect technology, privacy, labor, global competitiveness, and, for some reason, immigration.

As you might have guessed: I don’t buy this argument.

To require a senator’s personal involvement before he or she can be either “interested” or “qualified” to address a sector of our economy is an idea that quickly succumbs to reductio ad absurdum.

Only a quarter of senators served in the military. Are the rest uninterested in our armed forces?

Almost no senators are farmers. Are the rest unqualified to vote on agricultural subsidies?

And so on.

But quibbles with Rampell’s line of reasoning is not my main concern. I’m more worried by the fact that many readers will, without much deliberation, agree with her.

This idea that you must embrace everything Internet, or be labeled incurious, out of touch, or even Ludditic has become ubiquitous.

This sentiment is harmful, and probably even damaging to our country’s economic competitiveness.

This conclusion follows from an obvious point worth repeated reiteration: not all digital tools are useful to all people. To force everyone to use everything, or be deemed out of touch, will make many people worse at what they do.

Senators, for example, don’t need e-mail. Their staffs do, but the senators don’t. To be a member of the world’s greatest deliberative body means that you’re better off spending your time actually deliberating than checking your BlackBerry.

Do you really think John McCain or Chuck Schumer would somehow be better at their job if they spent more time cleaning their inbox?

My argument on this point has been consistent over the years: we need to take Internet technologies off a pedestal. They’re simply tools, like a wheat combine or an architect’s t-square.

For some people they’re indispensable. For others they don’t matter.

It’s more important to turn our attention back to the metric that does matter universally: Are you creating value in the world.

This is what should concern us. Not whether or not I can easily find you on Gmail.

You Are Where You Work: More Examples of Fantastically Deep Working Spaces

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post about three writers who custom-built work spaces to help them go deeper with their craft. In response, many of you sent more examples of fantastic deep work spaces. I thought I’d share a few of my favorites, as the more I dive into this idea of “method working,” the more appealing it becomes…

David McCullough’s Cabin

(Image from Reason and Reflection.)

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough, it turns out, writes his biographies in a eight-by-twelve cabin on the property of his Martha’s Vineyard farm. He calls it his “World Headquarters.” Supposedly, he once quipped, “nothing good was ever written in a large room.”

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Lincoln Library

(Image from the Wall Street Journal.)

Not to be outdone, another Pulitzer-winning historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin, wrote much of Team of Rivals at her Concord, Massachusetts home, in a library holding over 1000 books on the former president.

Hans Zimmer’s Gothic Studio

(Image by Trey Ratcliff.)

The movie composer Hans Zimmer built a Gothic/Victorian studio that perfectly matches his style of brooding crescendo.

Mahler’s Hut

(Image from Alex Ross.)

And the composer Gustav Mahler did much of his great work in a collection of three huts he built to escape the city noise. The one pictured above, facing the water, is my personal favorite.

Compelling Career Advice from Barack Obama

A Compelling Answer 

Earlier today, a reader pointed me toward a blog post about Barack Obama from the Humans of New York project. The post quotes Obama’s answer to the following question: When is the time you felt most broken?

The president begins his response by recalling a doubt-ridden plateau in his political career…

“I first ran for Congress in 1999, and I got beat. I just got whooped…for me to run and lose that bad, I was thinking maybe this isn’t what I was cut out to do.”

What caught my attention (and the attention of the reader who forwarded me the interview) is the idea Obama leveraged to move forward…

“But the thing that got me through that moment, and any other time that I’ve felt stuck, is to remind myself that it’s about the work. Because if you’re worrying about yourself — if you’re thinking: ‘Am I succeeding? Am I in the right position? Am I being appreciated?’  — then you’re going to end up feeling frustrated and stuck. But if you can keep it about the work, you’ll always have a path. There’s always something to be done.”

In SO GOOD, I called this the craftsman mindset. It asks that you stop obsessing about what the world can offer you, and instead focus on what you can offer the world.

Notice, this mindset is often at odds with the popular advice to “follow your passion.” Barack Obama was probably not feeling a lot of passion for politics after his loss to Bobby Rush. But he thought he had something to offer in this arena, so he persisted. (See my recent Business Insider article on Steve Jobs for another example of this mindset at work.)

The power of this advice, however, is probably best summed up by the note that the reader who sent me this article appended to the message.

“I respect this a lot about Obama,” he wrote, before admitting, “and, I’m a Republican.”

(Quote and image from Humans of New York.)

Deep Habits: Work With Your Whole Brain

Surprising Understanding

Last summer, I wrote a post detailing various strategies for reading mathematical proofs faster.

Last week, I stumbled across a new strategy that I think may be relevant for many different types of deep information processing.

I came across this strategy while peer reviewing a complicated computer science paper. As I read, I quickly became frustrated. I was processing lemmas and theorems, one by one, but as the details for each slipped from my short term memory to make room for the next, there was no sense of a coherent whole. It was as if I couldn’t get my metaphorical arms around this mathematical beast.

After an hour of this blind processing I decided to step back and try to summarize what I understood so far.

It was here that things got interesting.

As I wrote, I discovered to my surprise that I actually understood way more than I expected. My short summary stretched into a longer digression on the problem, why it was hard, what their technique did differently than previous results, and, in the final accounting, where the real contributions could be found.

To be clear, I didn’t have the math all worked out. If you asked me to recreate all the proof details, I couldn’t. But somehow during my frustrated slog from one step to the next, another part of my mind was dutifully collecting and organizing the pieces — work which didn’t become apparent until I tried to write down what I knew.

New Thoughts on Thoughts

Not long ago, when researching a yet to be announced new writing project, I stumbled into a large research literature on what is sometimes called Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT). At the core of UTT is the following idea: the parts of our brain supporting conscious thought represent only a small fraction of our neuronal horsepower. When it comes to complex tasks, therefore, our conscious attention can help intake and understand only a limited amount of information at a time.

Other parts of our brain, however, that operate below the level of conscious attention, are able to dedicate a lot more resources to processing these tasks: even though we don’t always realize this is going on.

I suspect this is what was happening during my paper review. While reading the paper, my conscious mind could only hold a limited amount of the complex information in my working memory at any given moment. The result was the frustrating feeling that I didn’t understand how the pieces fit together.

In the background, however, other parts of my brain were processing this information, trying different configurations and looking for effective ways to fit things together into a more coherent assembly.

When I then tasked myself with summarizing what I knew, my conscious brain tapped into this large reservoir of unconscious work, surprising me by how much I actually understood.

At least, this is one possible explanation.

Process then Summarize

Regardless of the exact source of the phenomenon I encountered, I suspect the strategy that generated it provides a useful deep habit for many cases where you must make sense of a large amount of complicated information.

Spend time to process the information, piece by piece, with full concentration. Once you’re done, step back and try to summarize what you learned. Though the process of digesting the information might feel frustratingly scattered, you’ll likely be surprised by how much work the other parts of your mind accomplished on your behalf. By writing down what you know, you cement this effort.

J.K. Rowling’s Magical Writing Hut and the Pursuit of True Depth

A Magical Muse

This past fall, news broke that Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling was building a replica of Hagrid’s hut near the border of a forest on her Scottish estate.

Though its intended use is unknown, Entertainment Weekly speculated Rowling might be designing the ultimate writing cabin for her current project: penning the screenplay for a Potter prequel.

This reminded me of Neal Stephenson. To set the right mood for his 17th century historical novel, Quicksilver, he wrote the manuscript longhand with a fountain pen, in a basement alcove decorated by an 18th century map of London.

Similarly, when Michael Pollan still lived in Connecticut, he wrote his books about nature in a hut (which he built by hand) in the woods beyond his backyard. On nice days, the large window facing his desk could be swung open — erasing the boundary between outside and in.

Immersive Work

I love how these authors strive to inhabit the deep work that’s made them famous, and don’t just treat their craft as another series of tasks to be checked off somewhere between sending e-mail and stopping by the store. They make work an experience, not a chore.

Perhaps this is part of why they’re so good at it?

Staring aspirationally at the photos above, it’s hard not to wonder if it’s possible to translate this emphasis on crafting the best possible environment to other knowledge work pursuits. What would the ultimate computer programming den look like? How about the optimal mathematician’s proof solving chamber?

Maybe in a future where deep work is given its due, these are questions that will have ready answers.

(Hagrid hut photo by Scott Smith)

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My friend Elizabeth Grace Saunders just published her new book with Harvard Business Review Press. It’s called How to Invest Your Time Like Money. Elizabeth’s systematic treatment of making decisions about what to spend time on (as oppose to the standard focus on organizing your existing commitments) has been influential to my thinking. Check out what she has to say…

This Company Eliminated E-mail…and Nothing Bad Happened

Super Casual Friday

Last week, an article in the Washington Post caught my attention. It was titled, “At some start-ups, Friday is so casual that it’s not even a work day,” and it focused on an Oregon-based tech company called Treehouse.

This company, it turns out, offers an unusual perk to its employees: no work on Friday.

The idea of a four day week upset people in the tech world. Michael Arrington, for example, responded:

“As far as I’m concerned, working 32 hours a week is a part-time job…I look for founders who are really passionate. Who want to work all the time. That shows they care about what they’re doing, and they’re going to be successful.”

But here’s the thing: Treehouse is successful.

The company, which offers online courses, has enrolled over 100,000 students and raised over $13 million in funding. Last year saw 100% revenue growth, and, perhaps not surprisingly, they have near 100% employee retention.

A Deep Paradox

At first, this might seem like a paradox: Treehouse reduced working hours yet didn’t reduce its effectiveness. The solution comes later in the article when the company’s founder explains:

“That’s the key. Do what’s important for you. Then, when you have time, respond to things…I’ve definitely worked in environments where all I did was e-mail. Now, internally, there’s almost zero. That’s a huge, huge win for the company.”

He elaborates that he’s eliminated an e-mail-centric cult of connectivity at Treehouse. Employees communicate in forums dedicated to specific projects, and the expectation that you can and should receive instant answers to your electronic missives doesn’t exist.

The solution to our above paradox, in other words, is that the eight hours cut from Treehouse employees’ weekly schedule disproportionately affected shallow efforts (namely: preserving a culture of constant e-mail connectivity). The reason their company still thrives is that the deep efforts that matter most remained unmolested.

This interpretation, if true, provides another piece of evidence for a conclusion I’ve been pitching for a while here on Study Hacks: a lot of the busyness afflicting the burnt out knowledge work class isn’t actually producing much value.

If more companies (and individuals) followed Treehouse’s lead and actually tested the conventional wisdom that all of this distracting shallowness is vital, I suspect we’d suddenly see a lot more emphasis on deep work in our cultural conversation surrounding productivity and effectiveness.

Deep Habits: Work Analog

A Curious Observation

I’ve written enough books at this point to notice trends about the process. Case in point, while many stages of pulling together a book end up going slower than expected, there’s one stage, in particular, that typically goes quicker: polishing the manuscript.

I have a theory for the phenomenon. When I polish a book manuscript, I always work with printouts and a pen (as I also advise, in Straight-A, for paper writing). Because this work doesn’t need a computer, I tend to settle in somewhere conducive to concentration, like The Chair (above), and end up working with more focus for longer sessions than normal.

The magic ingredient, I suspect, is the analog nature of the process. A computer is a portal to near endless distraction. Because we use these machines for so much of our efforts, the staccato rhythm of broken concentration they generate begins to feel natural — as if this is the necessary experience of work.

All it takes, however, is a forced break from the digital — as I experience when polishing my books — to remember the levels of depth we’re missing, and the satisfactions they can bring.

Inspired by this observation, I’ve found myself increasingly trying to carve out tasks that can be done free from a screen. I’m now more likely, for example, to venture to a library with only a notebook to work on a proof, or to leave my laptop in my bag at my office to dig into some paper reviews.

Analog work is underrated. Try it for yourself: you won’t be disappointed.