Warren Buffett sits and thinks.
April 13th, 2006
Ponder this interview from News.com:
Why can't you pay attention anymore?
Read the whole thing (and this post from 43 Folders that pointed me to it), but here's the quote that inspired the heading for this post:
Organizations are sacrificing their most valuable asset, namely the imagination and creativity of the brains they employ, by allowing ADT [attention deficit trait] to infest the organization. It's not that hard to deal with, once you identify it. You need to set limits and preserve time to think. Warren Buffett sits in a little office in the middle of nowhere and spends a lot of his time just thinking. And we are not giving ourselves that opportunity.
Warren Buffett sits in a room and thinks. John Tukey sat and thought. Isaac Newton sat and thought.
Even someone as scatterbrained and distracted as me can notice a trend here.
Join me, won't you, in committing to more sitting and thinking, and less of the ADT behavior that plagues so many knowledge workers today. Knowledge loses value when we do not spare the time to digest it.
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:36 pm
[…] I like Richard Hamming’s essay “You and Your Research” so much that I’ve recommended it here, not once or twice but at least thrice. Hamming was a Bell Labs scientist who did amazing things in the early days of computing. He had the opportunity to view at close range some of the great masters of computing in the twentieth century, including the great John Tukey. I reread Hamming’s piece at intervals to remind myself of what it most important in doing research. […]
September 15th, 2008 at 6:04 am
[…] I heartily recommend sitting and thinking. […]