Back in 2012, as a young assistant professor, I traveled to Berkeley to attend a wedding. On the first morning after we arrived, my wife had a conference call, so I decided to wander the nearby university campus to work on a vexing theory problem my collaborators and I had taken to calling “The Beast.”
I remember what happened next because I wrote an essay about the experience. The tale starts slow:
“It was early, and the fog was just starting its march down the Berkeley hills. I eventually wandered into an eucalyptus grove. Once there, I sipped my coffee and thought.”
I eventually come across an interesting new technique to circumvent a key mathematical obstacle thrown up by The Beast. But this hard-won progress soon presented a new issue:
“I realized… that there’s a limit to the depth you can reach when keeping an idea only in your mind. Looking to get the most out of my new insights, and inspired by my recent commitment to the textbook method, I trekked over to a nearby CVS and bought a 6×9 stenographer’s notebook…I then forced myself to write out my thoughts more formally. This combination of pen and paper notes with the exotic context in which I was working ushered in new layers of understanding.”
I even included a nostalgically low-resolution photo of these notes:
More than a decade later, I can’t remember exactly which academic paper I was working on in that eucalyptus grove, but based on some clues from the photo above, I’m pretty sure it was this one, which was published the following year and received a solid 65 citations.
I revisited this essay on my podcast this week. The activity it captured seemed a strong rebuke to the current vision of a fast-paced, digitized, AI-dominated workplace that Silicon Valley keeps insisting we must all embrace.
There’s a deeply human satisfaction to retreating to an exotic location and wrestling with your own mind, scratching a record of your battle on paper. The innovations and insights produced by this long thinking are deeper and more subversive than the artificially cheery bullet points of a chatbot.
The problem facing knowledge work in our current moment is not that we’re lacking sufficiently powerful technologies. It’s instead that we’re already distracted by so many digital tools that there’s no time left to really open the throttle on our brains.
And this is a shame.
Few satisfactions are more uniquely human than the slow extraction of new understanding, illuminated through the steady attention of your mind’s eye.
So, grab a notebook and head somewhere scenic to work on a hard problem. Give yourself enough time, and the enthusiastic clamor about a world of AI agents and super-charged productivity will dissipate to a quiet hum.
Although not a knowledge worker, I started journaling about the various dilemmas and tactical issues that arise during daily police patrol.
Love this! Great start to the week. Thank you.
I believe we should always do a cognitive effort as a first step, long enough before turning to AI for solutions. That cognitive effort will create or reinforce pathways in our brain and that effort will be stored in our long-term memory. This is how we learn and create solutions.
AI has the advantage of providing solutions or ideas when we are stuck. But that initial cognitive effort without AI is more than necessary.
For example, textbooks can be complex to understand, as all the steps necessary to our understanding are not explained. AI can be a great tool for scaffolding and understanding, provided that we made the effort to understand and ask questions in the first place.
Don’t you think is better to find our way out of the “stuck” by our own means? People have been doing that for ages (I ask genuinely)
I understand your point. When we encountered a problem in the past, we had resources to get unstuck: books, other experts’ perspectives or even our own thinking. AI is now another added resource. But we should not forget that AI is not the only resource we have, and considering how easy it is to use, I’m afraid many people only rely on AI and forget the rest
Thank you for your response. I agree.
Do you think this “hard problem” could be related to something personal? Going to a place where one can confront an internal problem (like the screen addiction itself) and write about it.
And I would add: You were also out in nature. We’ve been hearing more studies how being in nature helps our brains.
I understand your point. When we encountered a problem in the past, we had resources to get unstuck: books, other experts’ perspectives or even our own thinking. AI is now another added resource. But we should not forget that AI is not the only resource we have, and considering how easy it is to use, I’m afraid many people only rely on AI and forget the rest
The real question is not whether Cal is a good writer; it is whether he actually discovered transformers back during his PhD and has been using them ever since.
Immersion and incubation steps need to come before this approach.
There is general consensus in the research on creativity, and anecdotal evidence, that an initial stage of immersion, perhaps with AI assisted reading and notetaking, in a problem, should be followed by a rest period away from the task (the incubation period). Then, breakthroughs are more likely by taking the approach Cal suggests, a pen and paper analog approach with a change in setting (preferable a wide open environment) would likely give the best results.
The approach Cal suggests is most likely to be effective after the immersion and incubation steps according to creativity research. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-52135-001
I used to be very good at this, but now I am really old and sick and taking too many medications that interfere with my ability to focus. I can still hyperfocus easily: in other words, I have no trouble reading for hours. This podcast has enabled me to realize, first of all, why morning pages no longer work for me. The system you are recommending really requires that you keep going back and reading what you already wrote, and that you keep stopping and turning things over in your head. So I have given up on loose leaf and ordered a steno notebook, which I didn’t even realize still existed. But your second recommendation, to do it in a scenic place, is the one problem I have already understood. I made the mistake of moving to Albuquerque in order to do a natural movement program and it was fine until the pandemic came and everything disappeared. Now I really miss the Berkeley Hills and all the other places in the Bay Area where it was so easy for me to write. There’s nothing here but city and desert and honestly, I hate the desert. And even to get to the desert, I’d have to drive for God knows how long. I used to write in coffeehouses (I started in Greenwich Village in the early 60s) but now they all play loud rock music that drives me crazy. Maybe you could consider how many people live in situations like mine, and come up with some brilliant ideas for how to do this in very non-scenic places.
Not sure if this is the best idea since in involves media. But when the weather is too bad to go outside, I put on a scenic YouTube video on my tv autumn’s fall leaves or medieval tavern with fireplace. Ambient music. They usually last for hours.
I am “THAT” Old, too & can Totally relate. Yes, they still do make those steno noyebooks w hich brings me back to my shorthand class in H.S.
Hello Lisa! ❤️❤️ I am young but disabled, and I take six meds at once! I identify with everything you’ve been saying.
Even non scenic places do have beautiful objects in them. Perhaps you could do a close up of an object you enjoy. You could also wear a beautiful perfume to give you a nice ambiance as well. I find that perfumes take me to faraway places.
Hope this helps! With much love from Mississippi!!
I am “THAT” Old, too & can Totally relate. Yes, they still do make those steno noyebooks w hich brings me back to my shorthand class in H.S.
I would add that I have found a small dry erase board therapeutic. I can write anything and erase my thoughts without anybody knowing.