Overnight Success
by Gordon Weakliem
There’s some kind of vector running through by Bluesky feed the last 24 hours. I first ran into Armin Ronacher’s Some Things Just Take Time where he says this:
If someone 50 years ago planted a row of oaks or a chestnut tree on your plot of land, you have something that no amount of money or effort can replicate. The only way is to wait.
In a comment on Armin’s bluesky, someone linked to Allen Pike An Unreasonable Amount of Time quoting Teller of Penn & Teller:
Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.
And then I ran into Sung Kim linking to an interview with Terence Tao where Terence says:
we’ve become really good at optimizing everything… there’s some serendipitous interactions that you may not think are optimal, but actually are really important.
There’s a theme here that friction is important and that inefficiency isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
One sentiment I hear a lot, and I feel personally, is that people are exhausted, and it’s not always the pace demanded by external forces. Some of this is self-imposed, we’ve optimized our lives into being completely packed with productivity and there’s a paradox in that.