“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”
– Raymond Joseph Teller
What we usually chalk up to talent, luck, or other forms of “magic” is often the result of persistence. We overestimate the impact of one moment’s Herculean force and underestimate what can be accomplished with smaller, but steadier efforts. Maintaining our focus through monotonous work is often the difference between a breakthrough and falling short.
“Sometimes, magic is mundane.”
I recently came across the story of a software engineer’s experience on a team maintaining a system with a sizable backlog of complaints and software bugs. Jacob Kaplan-Moss writes that there was no plan for dealing with problems, and though the issues were all tagged, there was no way of knowing which issues should take higher priority. The backlog of bugs was stacked and growing daily because no one was combing through the list to prioritize or address anything. People were taking random reports and working to fix an issue here or there, but those unfocused efforts didn’t move the needle on the larger problem. Kaplan-Moss personally took on the task of unraveling this huge knot and finding a way to make the feedback process smoother. He categorized the issues, piled the pages into stacks, and scheduled them to be addressed in order of importance. Then, he matched the complaint with a team to fix it, so they could clear up each issue with some finality. Here’s how Kaplan-Moss describes the endeavor:
“I used the same trick as the magician, which is no trick at all: I did the work. I printed out all the issues – one page of paper for each issue. I read each page. I took over a huge room and started making piles on the floor. I wrote tags on sticky notes and stuck them to piles. I shuffled pages from one stack to another. I wrote ticket numbers on whiteboards in long columns; I imagined I was Ben Affleck in “The Accountant”. I spent almost three weeks in that room, and emerged with every bug report reviewed, tagged, categorized, and prioritized.”
What worked for Kaplan-Moss is applicable across countless industries. It wasn’t instantaneous and it wasn’t magic, though it may have appeared magical or easy to onlookers. He worked on the backlog issue for nearly three weeks. Three weeks is a long time to print and organize piles of paper, yet look at the results. He emerged from those stacks with a huge problem broken down into smaller parts, and armed with with a plan of attack for each one. He reduced the problem from a company-wide annoyance to a series of issues to be addressed by the appropriate team. Not only was the pileup solved, they now had a plan to prevent another backlog from building up. To an onlooker, it might appear he waved his wand and made the huge tangle of complaints disappear, but that wasn’t the case. “People said I did the impossible,” he writes, “but that’s wrong: I merely did something so boring that nobody else had been willing to do it.” His willing to endure boredom long enough to break through the problem resulted in a victory for the entire team.
There’s a joke among pilots that their jobs are long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. It’s similar, albeit much less dangerous, with writing; laboring away for hours working on ideas and execution, enjoying a few moments of pride when work is published or praised. Then, it’s back to work on the next piece. Sticking with any habit or line of work long enough and you’ll find tedious or boring aspects to it. However, developing the ability to withstand boredom is critical to succeeding in any long term endeavor, whether it spans weeks or years.
“Magic” is on the other side of the willingness to focus on boring tasks for an extended amount of time.
To sustain the effort required to break through resistance, one must become acquainted with boredom. It’s true with physical obstacles, and it’s true for other goals, too. Finishing your sets and not missing workouts is boring. Eating mostly nutritious food is boring. Making time to read may sound boring. These are also among the most rewarding and healthy habits you can form. Flashy trends and short-lived experiments don’t offer much of a foundation to work with. It’s not the occasional week of hyper-productivity which hastens success, but the ability to concentrate and work through boredom. Being able to endure tedium is an advantage. Breakthroughs require focused, repeated effort.
“I often have people newer to the tech industry ask me for secrets to success. There aren’t many, really, but this secret — being willing to do something so terrifically tedious that it appears to be magic — works in tech too.”
– Jacob Kaplan-Moss
For as long as I can remember, my father has a simple truism posted in his office: “Persistence overcomes resistance.” It’s a reminder to keep chipping away, to keep working on the task at hand and be diligent about that work. Progress may be unseen for a while, but that doesn’t mean progress isn’t being made. Results need time to compound. James Clear illustrates this principle in Atomic Habits using the analogy of heating water to its boiling point. Water has to reach 212 degrees Fahrenheit to boil; any less and it sits still. Toiling in tedium can feel like staring at a pot of water, endless and mildly frustrating, but the water will boil once it reaches the right temperature. The key is not getting discouraged and stopping short at 210 degrees. Your job is to keep working until you’ve hit the boiling point, the point of breakthrough. As the saying goes, change happens slowly, then all at once. The greatest lesson many of us can learn is patience combined with persistence.
Kaplan-Moss described the willingness to toil in tedium as a secret, a fitting remark, as few people seem to realize this is an option available to them. The cost of patience and persistence is only time. How much of what we attribute to talent, timing, or luck really comes down to a person’s persistence in creating great work? How much talent is compounded over those hours and years of iteration? Is it really luck if you’ve toiled for a decade, creating a prolific backlog of work? This isn’t to say talent or timing don’t matter, but that your odds of favorable timing increase with the number of iterations you produce and the amount of time you spend creating solutions. So much of success in life, which appears magical to others, is simply sticking with the boring stretches between breakthroughs.
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
