Slowness is a Virtue - Jakob Schwichtenberg’s Newsletter

In academia, that’s what you can get funding for. Fast questions can be answered within a few weeks. You can then publish a paper. You can start collecting citations. You can present your answer at conferences. This is how you build a career. But the most important questions can’t be answered like that. When you can write down a step-by-step plan for how you’re going to answer a question or solve a specific problem, you aren’t doing research but development. Research means you only have a fuzzy idea of your destination but no clear idea of how you’re going to get there. You’re mostly just following hunches and intuitions. That’s how the biggest leaps forward are achieved. Development is the execution of a map toward a goal while research is the pursuit of a goal without a map. Working on questions you can answer fast means you know what you’re doing. And knowing what you’re doing is a sign you’re not pushing into genuinely new territory. Slowness allows for the exploration of uncharted

In academia, that’s what you can get funding for. Fast questions can be answered within a few weeks. You can then publish a paper. You can start collecting citations. You can present your answer at conferences. This is how you build a career. But the most important questions can’t be answered like that. When you can write down a step-by-step plan for how you’re going to answer a question or solve a specific problem, you aren’t doing research but development. Research means you only have a fuzzy idea of your destination but no clear idea of how you’re going to get there. You’re mostly just foll