The Best Things
“I’ve got this particular opinion,” the entrepreneur Palmer Luckey said, “that I haven’t talked about too much: I believe that technology has moved in the wrong direction as a result of the iPhone, exclusively.” One of the innovations of the iPhone, one of its defining achievements, was making something extraordinarily complex very easy to learn how to use. In the wake of the iPhone’s success, Luckey said, “everyone started trying to make things that were similarly easy to use, things where you could hand it to somebody with no training, and they could puzzle it out in about one or two minutes.” Video editors with simple cutting tools, preset visual effects, automatic captions, and ready-made soundtracks. Graphic design platforms with templates, layouts, color palettes, font pairings, and drag-and-drop controls. Espresso machines with touchscreen menus, built-in grinders, automatic dosing, and automatic frothing. “Nobody even bothers to make devices or applications anymore unless they can be figured out in a matter of 10 minutes,” Luckey continued. “And I think that is to the detriment of society. The best things that I know how to do—not just in tech; in anything in life—they’re not things I was able to figure out how to do in 10 minutes.”
Some good things about things that take time to figure out or use—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The Myth Of Instant Traction
In the early 2000s, LEGO was in serious trouble. The company had spent the mid- and late-1990s redesigning its product line around some market research finding that life was about to radically change for children. They were going to have shorter attention spans. They were going to have easy access to all kinds of entertainment. They were going to have less time and less patience for putting something together piece by piece. So LEGO implemented a so-called “instant traction” product principle: everything had to be easy to use, easy enough for newcomers to be able to figure out in only a few minutes. This was a disaster. They struggled to attract new customers, and existing users did not take to the new products either. In 2003, net sales fell 26 percent, the company reporting a loss of roughly 1.4 billion, then another 1.931 billion in 2004. That year, they brought in a new CEO, who hired a team of anthropologists (or “human-science researchers”) to investigate a basic question: Why do children play? Not when, where, or how. Why? The researchers went around the world, into homes, schools, and playgrounds, watching kids play, interviewing parents, studying bedrooms, favorite objects, and the subtle status games kids play with one another. At one house, a kid discreetly asked one of the researchers if they wanted to see something, leading him to his room, where he pulled a shoebox out from under the bed and unveiled the exotic mushrooms he’d been growing. At another, a boy invited the researchers to ask him about any professional football player, but they didn’t know much about football, so the boy went ahead and rattled off the stats of player after player. In Germany, they asked an eleven-year-old if there were things he owned that he would be devastated to lose. Only one, the boy said, running upstairs and returning with a beat-up pair of Adidas shoes. He pointed out the few spots worn especially thin, the places that had dragged and rubbed against his skateboard, hundreds and hundreds of times, until he finally figured out a certain trick. Taken together, the researchers’ findings “dismantled all of the assumptions about children’s need for instant gratification from their toys,” they wrote. “It was the exact opposite. The most meaningful play for children seemed to involve degrees of difficulty.” They went back to LEGO with the recommendation to reverse course, to refocus around the challenging, brick-by-brick, time-consuming sets that had been the source of its appeal for most of the company’s history. People aren’t really after a frictionless “plug and play” experience, they said. What we’re after is that satisfaction of “paying our dues,” of being able to point at something—a pair of beat-up shoes, a box of mushrooms, a head full of football stats, a finished LEGO set—and say, “I did that,” “I grew those,” “I know all about that,” “I built that,” “I figured that out.”
But Nobody Asks How Much Time I Spend Thinking
In 1965, David McCullough bought a secondhand Royal manual typewriter to write his first book, The Johnstown Flood. He went on to use it for the next fifty-four years, writing every one of his books on it. As computers became widespread, friends and family explained how much work he could save himself if he switched. Moving a paragraph, for instance, would no longer require retyping a whole page. “You could go so much faster if you used a word processor,” they would say. “I know that,” he would tell them. “I don’t want to go faster. If anything, I need to go slower. I don’t think all that fast.” And that’s what writing really is,” McCullough liked to point out. “You know, I am often asked how much of my time do I spend writing and how much of my time do I spend researching. But nobody asks me how much of my time do I spend thinking. And the thinking is the hardest part.”
What Is Happening When Your Mind Spends 7 Hours On A Topic
The allure of a large language model like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini is that it can process information, create content, generate ideas, and research topics in almost no time with almost no user effort. “Few have thought through the costs that will impose,” Ezra Klein writes in Beyond the ‘Matrix’ Theory of the Human Mind. “Even if those summaries and drafts are pretty good, something is lost in the outsourcing.” Mainly, the things we can get only through processing information, creating content, generating ideas, and researching topics ourselves. “Part of what is happening when you spend 7 hours reading a book,” Klein said elsewhere, “is you spend 7 hours with your mind on the topics in the book, grappling with them, drawing connections, having thoughts you would not otherwise have had. And so without that process of grappling, without those hours inside that book, it doesn’t get inside you. It doesn’t impress itself upon you. It doesn’t change you. What reading and writing and processing information is supposed to do is change you.”
The Final Determining Factor
Writing in the early 2000s about the technologies newly available to make his job faster and more efficient, the great film editor and sound designer Walter Murch talked about why he still prefers the tools he’s been using since the 70s. “The real issue with speed,” Murch writes in his book In The Blink Of An Eye, “is not just how fast you can go, but where are you going so fast? It doesn’t help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place.” And: “Ultimately…technology is hardly ever the final determining factor in questions of speed vs. creativity.” He points out that in the 19th century, the French novelist Honoré de Balzac wrote eighty novels in twenty years, using just a quill pen. “Who among our word-processing artists today can even approach such a record?”
The Special Revelation
The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen observed that many things we come to enjoy in life—songs, books, subjects, people, foods, places, activities—have qualities we gradually come to recognize and appreciate. “You’ve got to spend a good amount of time with things,” he said, “to have that special revelation.”