The Long Moment

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:

Hey everyone, welcome to Daily Creative. My name is Todd Henry. In 1986, a Princeton mathematician named Andrew Wiles walked up the stairs to the attic of his house and he effectively disappeared. He had decided to attempt to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, a problem that had defeated the best minds in the world for more than 300 years, and he told his wife and one colleague, no one else. He stopped going to conferences. He set aside every other project he cared about, and then he spent 7 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 darkened mansion. You walk into a room that you cannot see.

Todd Henry [00:00:48]:

You bump into the furniture for 6 months. Slowly, you kind of learn where everything is, and eventually your hand finds the light switch. The room fills with light and you finally understand where you've 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. He was successful. It was front page news. And then a few months later, a reviewer found a flaw in the proof.

Todd Henry [00:01:18]:

Now, this is the interesting part of the story. Wiles went back into the attic for another year, publicly this time. With the whole mathematical world watching and waiting for him to fail. He said it was the most painful stretch of his working life. Finally, in September of 1994, the answer came. 7 years on the first version, 1 more year in the dark to finish it. Now listen, I'm not telling you this because I think any of us need to go try to prove a theorem. Of course, that's not what this show is about.

Todd Henry [00:01:50]:

It's probably not the kind of work that you do, although maybe, who knows? We do have mathematicians who listen. Yeah. But I'm telling you this because most of us now quit somewhere around minute 4. We don't have the diligence and the discipline to go to the attic for extended periods of time to focus deeply on work. Back in February, I had a conversation with Peter Schmidt, who studies what's happening to our attention. And he gave me a phrase that I haven't been able to forget since. I've used it many times in my own talks, in my own presentations with attribution to Peter. He calls it human fracking.

Todd Henry [00:02:27]:

The image comes straight out of the oil fields. You don't extract the resource by digging one deep hole. You have to fracture the rock into 1,000 tiny fissures and pull all of them at once. And that's how you get to largely inaccessible pockets of oil, right? And what Peter said is that's what's being done to our attention. And that's why it never feels like theft. No one takes an hour from you. They take 90 seconds while your coffee brews. They take 4 minutes while you're in line at the pharmacy.

Todd Henry [00:02:59]:

They take 11 seconds between one thought and the next when your hand reaches for your pocket before you consciously decide to do it. At the end of the day, you can't point to what you lost, but you lost it. It is human fracking. It is attentional fracking. And what you lost is a phrase that I've been sitting with now because it came to mind on a recent trip to New York, a phrase that I've been trying to embrace more and more in my life. It's something that I call the long moment. Listen, there's a short moment and then there's a long moment and they don't behave the same way. The short moment is fast.

Todd Henry [00:03:34]:

It's stimulating. It feels productive. Information goes in, something is happening. The long moment is slower. It's less comfortable. It's considerably less fun. It feels like sitting in a dark mansion, bumping into the furniture. It's the 3rd hour with a stubborn idea.

Todd Henry [00:03:52]:

It's the drive with no soundtrack, or maybe just instrumental music. It's the walk where you don't listen to anything, including me or this podcast, right? Here's what I've come to believe after 20-plus years of watching brilliant people work and having the opportunity to be invited into the process of some of the top performers in the world. Ideas of any consequence do not arrive in the short moment. It may feel like they do because sometimes they happen quickly, but usually those brief moments, those ahas, are the result of having sat with a problem for a long period. They arrive in the long one. Steven Johnson calls it the slow hunch. The short moment hands you inputs. Only the long moment gives you those, the opportunity for those inputs to collide and turn into something valuable.

Todd Henry [00:04:44]:

Insight has a minimum length. You cannot shorten it by wanting more. So here's my challenge for you. As you think about these concepts, you think about short moments, long moments, you think about attentional fracking, human fracking. Find a place in your life where you would normally reach for stimulus and do not reach. It could be your commute. It could be the dishes. It could be 15 minutes before your next meeting.

Todd Henry [00:05:05]:

Instead of another podcast, instead of reaching for the feed, put on some instrumental music or put on nothing at all. Let it be boring. Boredom is not the absence of thought. It's very often the beginning of long thought. And when you're working on something that you feel sort of kind of pulled to reach for stimulus of some sort, Stay 10 minutes past the point where you want to leave. 10 minutes past comfortable is where obvious things disappear and the interesting ones begin. And you won't enjoy this. Just be frank.

Todd Henry [00:05:43]:

This is not fun. It's not. I do this often on my walks. I will go for a walk and I listen. I've had the same soundtrack I've listened to for 23 years now. It's an instrumental group. And I'm happy to share it. If you want to email me, just send an email through toddhenry.com.

Todd Henry [00:06:00]:

I'm happy to share with you what it is. But I've listened to this and the reason I do is because it's just background to me now. It's background noise to sort of crowd out the ambient noise so that my attention can really sort of be honed in on what it is my mind is trying to do. Many leaders and many people don't even know what's on their mind because they never spend time alone with their thoughts. Your attention has been trained to expect a reward every 90 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've spent my career arguing that the great tragedy is not failure.

Todd Henry [00:06:38]:

It is unfinished brilliance. The best work of most people never gets out of them. And I no longer think that it's mostly a talent problem. I don't, or even a courage problem. I think that it's largely That no idea in their life ever got to stay long enough to become anything. Nobody is going to protect your long moments for you. They're not. There's an entire economy built on making sure that you never have a long moment, that you're always looking for the next thing that could be monetized.

Todd Henry [00:07:07]:

Listen, Wiles spent 8 years in a dark room feeling for a light switch. You are not being asked for 8 years. You're 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 still standing in it. Remember, as we've said many, many times before, COVID bands don't change the world. The world needs you to engage fully and freely, bringing only the passion, skills, and experiences you can bring to the world around you. And if you don't do it, no one else will. So we need you to be in the long run.

Todd Henry [00:07:46]:

moment. Stay with it. Stay with your thoughts. Okay. Hey, I hope you found this helpful. Uh, we're going to get back to our interviews here within the next week or two, but if you want all of our interviews, full interviews, bonus content, and more, you can get them at dailycreativeplus.com. You send through your name and email address and we'll send you a private feed where you can listen to all of the interviews in full, in their entirety. My name is Todd Henry.

Todd Henry [00:08:09]:

If you want more info about my books or my speaking events, if you just want to support the show, go buy one of my books. I have 7 of them. You can find them at toddhenry.com or wherever you buy your books. Until next time, may you be brave, focused, and bright. We'll see you then.