Duration Neglect
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman writes about “duration neglect,” our tendency to assess life events by their peak or final moments, ignoring how we felt during most of the experience. When evaluating jobs, we often focus on isolated standout moments—like promotions, awards, or praise—while overlooking the day-to-day experiences and emotional states that make up the majority of our work life. When a creative project flops, the sense of failure can often erase the progress and satisfaction experienced along the way. To counter duration neglect, Kahneman proposes “a duration-weighted conception of well-being”—one that considers the overall quality of our experiences, rather than fixating on the fleeting peaks and outcomes. That’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The Long, Unheralded Journey
Most astronauts never go to space. “I took this job,” astronaut Chris Hadfield writes in An Astronaut’s Guide To Life On Earth, “knowing that I might be one of them.” He once summed up his career by saying, “Here’s a quick snapshot: I served as an astronaut for twenty-one years, and I was in space for six months.” The reality of being an astronaut involves years of training for potentially just days in space. And many factors that decide who gets to go on a mission are out of an astronaut’s control. For instance, after thirty years, the Shuttle was retired and replaced by the smaller Soyuz, making some astronauts from the Shuttle era too tall to fly. “The possibility that they’ll leave Earth is currently zero.” Knowing this, Hadfield approached his career with a duration-weighted conception, finding satisfaction in the work itself and seeing spaceflight as a potential bonus, not something to bank on. This realistic view, he says, “helped me love my job…throughout the long, unheralded journey that may or may not wind up at the launch pad.”
Get To Boring
In 2012, after a little over two years of marriage, musician Ben Gibbard and his wife divorced. When asked when things started to go wrong, Gibbard couldn’t point to a specific moment or event. It wasn’t a sudden falling out. “It was very, very exciting,” Gibbard recalls about the early days of their relationship. At the time, both of their careers were taking off, and their lives were filled with the thrill of fame, fortune, and everything that came with it. When their two worlds collided, the excitement doubled. And they allowed the peak moments of excitement to define their relationship, without weighing the importance of the more mundane, everyday experiences that ultimately determine long-term compatibility. “We didn’t do what I think everyone needs to do: you need to get to boring,” Gibbard said. “I wouldn’t call anything in our life together a mistake, but if there was one thing that would have been good to do, it would have been to get to boring first. Get to boring, and then determine if you’re truly compatible.” This struck me as a good way to determine career compatibility as well: find the thing where you enjoy the boring parts.
The Pinnacle is Over in an Instant
In 2008, “In The Heights” won a Grammy and four Tony Awards. At Radio City Music Hall, the entire cast and crew went up to receive the final Tony award presented: Best Musical. Two of them picked up the writer and star of the musical, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and put him on their shoulders. There was fist-pumping, waving, screaming, and smiles. Then the lights shifted and everyone in the audience got up and started exiting. But “In The Heights” director Tommy Kail stopped on stage and stood there by himself. As everyone emptied out of Radio City Music Hall, they talked about what after-party they were attending and what they were going to eat and what they were working on next. Kail stood on stage alone and thought, “Well if this is a pinnacle, and it’s over in an instant, and people are already talking about what’s next, it can’t be about this. It has to be about something more than this.” The “In The Heights” cast and crew stood on the Radio City Music Hall stage for forty-four seconds. That’s 0.000017% of the eight years Kail spent working on it. To let 0.000017% of an experience determine his happiness or satisfaction with the work, Kail realized, would be insane.
The Process of Making and The Process of Unmaking
When she was fourteen, the pioneering performance artist Marina Abramovic received painting lessons from an abstract landscape artist named Filo Filipović. In their first lesson, Filipović guided Abramovic through a long and meticulous process. He carefully prepared the canvas, placing it on the floor, methodically pouring glue, and slowly layering sand, yellow pigment, red pigment, and black. After devoting so much time and care, Filipović doused the canvas with half a liter of gasoline, struck a match, and dropped it on the canvas, causing the entire creation to explode in an instant. “And then he left,” Abramovic writes in Walk Through Walls. “This made a big impression on me. I waited until the charred mess had dried, and then very carefully pinned it to the wall.” She and her family went on vacation shortly after, and by the time she returned, the sun had dried everything up, leaving nothing but a pile of ashes. “Later on, I understood why this experience was so important,” Abramovic writes. “It taught me that the process was more important than the result, just as the performance means more to me than the object. I saw the process of making it and then the process of its unmaking. There was no duration or stability to it. It was pure process.”
The Ashes of Experience
Yves Klein—the French painter best known for his signature patented color International Klein Blue (IKB)—liked to say, “my paintings are only the ashes of my art.” They were the remnants of something far richer and more time-consuming: every moment, every experience, and every thought that preceded them. “The paintings,” he wrote, “are a function of my LIFE.” Just as Klein’s physical artwork was merely a fragment of everything that led up to it, the fleeting peaks and outcomes are the ashes of the duration-weighted experiences that create them.