23 Minutes: In Defense of Slow Thinkers

I always thought I was dumb. More precisely — that I was a slow thinker.

It manifested simply: in meetings and discussions, I couldn't quickly come up with a solution. Everyone would say things, sometimes smart things, while I just sat there in silence. It was even a bit awkward.

Everyone else also thought I was dumb. So they stopped inviting me to meetings. They invited those who could say something without hesitation.

But after leaving a meeting, I would keep thinking about the problem. And, as the saying goes, the best ideas come after the fact. I'd find a solid, sometimes interesting, and occasionally brilliant solution. But by then nobody needed it. The kind of "no point swinging your fists after the fight" situation.

The culture at the companies where I started my career was quite modern. You know how it goes — "a meeting must end with a decision." Whatever was dreamed up during the meeting gets adopted. Even if the solution is complete garbage.

Then I ended up at a factory. They couldn't care less about trendy management practices. No issue gets resolved in a single meeting. First there's a problem-statement meeting, then a discuss-options meeting, then another discuss-options meeting, then a decision-making meeting, a discuss-the-decision meeting, and so on.

And that's when things took off. At the first meeting I stayed silent, as usual. By the second one, I'd bring a solution. And my solutions started getting accepted! Partly because nobody else continued thinking about the problem after leaving the meeting.

The owner noticed this quirk in my behavior and officially allowed me to keep quiet during meetings. Oh, and I also noticed that I listen better to what's going on when I play Bejeweled Classic on my phone. So that's how we settled it.

Everyone sits, discusses, shares opinions, argues — and I play on my phone. Then after the meeting — an hour, a day, or a week later — I send in solution options. Or I walk over in person and explain.

I also noticed that if I don't stay silent at the first meeting — if I participate in the discussion — the result turns out worse. So I literally forced myself to stay quiet.

Since the approach worked, I simply kept using it. While continuing to think I was dumb. And everyone else was smart — they just didn't want to think about problems after leaving the meeting. In other words, the only difference was that they were lazy and not proactive.

For the exact same reason, I don't like talking to clients, especially on the phone. Because I'm of no help in such a conversation — I need to think. An in-person meeting is still somewhat okay — you can go silent for at least a few minutes, saying "hold on, let me think." In a phone or Skype call, such a pause would seem strange.

So that's how I lived for the past several years. And then I started reading books about how the brain works. And it turned out I was doing everything right.

Rule number one: the brain cannot perform two complex tasks simultaneously. For example, thinking and speaking. More precisely, it can, but with a dramatic loss in quality. If you're speaking well, you're not thinking. If you're thinking, you can't speak properly.

Rule number two: to begin thinking properly, the brain needs approximately 23 minutes to "load" the information. This time is spent building so-called complex intellectual objects — roughly speaking, a multidimensional model of the problem appears in your head, with all its connections, nuances, and so on.

Only after those 23 minutes does actual "thinking" — quality work — begin. What's interesting is that it can proceed asynchronously. That is, you can sit and work on a different task while your brain continues searching for a solution to the previously "loaded" problem.

You know how it happens — you're sitting there watching TV, or smoking, or having lunch, and — bam! — a solution arrives. Even though at that very moment you were thinking about what goes into pesto sauce. That's the asynchronous "thinker" at work. In programmer terms, it's a background job that was launched several days ago finally completing, or a very belated promise resolving.

Rule number three: having solved a problem, the brain stores the solution in working memory and can retrieve it quickly. Accordingly, the more problems you've solved, the more quick answers you know.

And the rest is simple. For any question or problem, the brain first produces a quick answer from its pool of already-known solutions. But this answer may be flawed. It merely seems to fit, but may not actually match the task.

Unfortunately, the brain doesn't like to think. So it tends to respond with automatisms to avoid actual thinking.

Any quick answer is an automatism — a template response based on accumulated experience. Whether to trust such an answer or not is up to you. Put simply: if a person answered quickly, they did not actually think about your question.

Conversely, if you yourself demand a quick answer, you're essentially dooming yourself to receiving a mediocre solution. It's like saying: hey dude, just sell me whatever junk you've got, I'm fine with it, and I'll leave.

If you want a quality answer, don't demand it immediately. Provide all the necessary information — and leave.

But automatisms aren't evil. The more you have, the better — they save time when solving problems. The more automatisms and ready answers you have, the more problems you solve quickly.

You just need to understand and use both streams — the fast one and the slow one. And not confuse them, correctly choosing for each specific task whether to fire off an automatic response or to actually think.

As Maxim Dorofeev wrote in his book: when in doubt — think. "In doubt" means when the brain hasn't produced any automatism in response.