The Slow Hunch
Or, why all eureka moments are lies
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Q: We all know about eureka moments. But, are there also ideas that took time to develop?
During the lazy summer of July 2001, Arizona-based FBI field agent Ken Williams wrote a six-page memo about a suspicious pattern he observed. A large number of people of “investigative interest” had registered for various flight schools in Arizona. He suspected a larger conspiracy behind it.
Williams suggested that the FBI should assemble a comprehensive list of all flight schools around the country, and flag anyone attempting to obtain a visa to attend one of these schools.
The memo was labelled as “speculative and not very significant”—or in layman terms “just a hunch”—by FBI analysts, and remained largely ignored. Few weeks later two passenger planes crashed into two New York buildings.
It’s true that if the FBI would start treating every other hunch with equal urgency, they’ll spend bulk of their time chasing ghosts and dead ends. But dismissing Williams’ idea only on those grounds misses a fundamental point. Williams’ hunch might have been speculative, but it wasn’t completely random or reactive—such as a gut feeling. It was an idea that slowly took shape over time, a pattern detected after countless hours of observation and inquiry. It was a Slow Hunch.
Most great ideas come into the world half-baked—more hunch than revelation. Charles Darwin didn’t think of the idea of natural selection the moment he arrived at the Galapagos. In fact, his notebook talks more about the geology of the Galapagos than its zoology. Unlike Darwin the trained geologist who was consciously processing and interpreting the facts as he gathered them, it was simply a fact-recording mission for Darwin the amateur naturalist. It took him several months after the Beagle voyage ended to realise the actual importance of his notes.
Snap discoveries based on intuition—as dramatic as they sound—are rarities. All hunches that turn into important innovations unfold over much longer time frames. As Steven Johnson writes, “They start with a vague, hard-to-describe sense that there’s an interesting solution to a problem that hasn’t yet been proposed, and they linger in the shadows of the mind, sometimes for decades, assembling new connections and gaining strength.”
When Joseph Priestley decided to isolate a mint twig in a sealed glass—an experiment that ultimately proved that plants can create oxygen, he was building on a slow hunch that he’d been cultivating for twenty years, dating back to his boyhood obsession with trapping spiders in glass jars.
But he didn’t pursue his hunch doggedly. During those twenty years, Priestley dabbled in a dozen different fields and concocted hundreds of experiments in his home lab. A minuscule percentage of that time was devoted directly to the problem of plant respiration. He just kept his hunch alive in the back of his mind.
Because slow hunches need so much time to develop, they are easily lost and often replaced by more immediate needs, but at the same time the lazy incubation period is also their strength. Developing slow hunches is less a matter of perspiration than of cultivation.
Stories of aha moments and serendipitous breakthroughs often blur out the details of the slow hunches in service of narrative pleasure. Unlike eureka moments, slow hunches are hard to convey, but the irony is that Archimedes didn’t simply get into a bathtub and stumbled on the original eureka moment just like that. It was the culmination of years of effort, spent dabbling in multiple fields such as mathematics, physics, engineering, astronomy, and cultivating multiple slow hunches in the back of the mind.
True insights require you to think something that no one has thought before in quite the same way. True insights take time. True insights come from slow hunches. In the story of intellectual discovery, a slow hunch isn’t an exception, it’s the rule.
Noteworthy Ideas
Following are a bunch of ideas on various topics from my personal library of notes that I’ve collected over the years.
I.
Be Slightly Underconfident
Confidence is the new overconfidence. To have an open mind, you need to be slightly underconfident.
We make the worst mistakes when we are too cocksure about the wrong things. It’s when we start to believe that we know better and don’t let the world help us. This is when the world teaches us a lesson.
But being slightly underconfident gives us the mindset to hear out others’ opinions, and tweak our plans when we come across ideas that run counter to ours. Being underconfident increases our chances of success.
II.
Don’t Complain
We prefer pointing out how things are bad instead of doing anything about them. We love to complain because it’s easy. Complaining gives 1/100th the satisfaction in 1/1000000000000th the effort. On top of that, when somebody fixes the problem we love giving ourselves credit for having brought it to attention.
It’s easy to confuse being “helpful” with actually being helpful when you are a master complainer. A lot of people think they’re “adding value” by nitpicking and supplying unsolicited takes when in reality they’re draining energy and momentum.
Don’t complain. Choose to be a maker instead. Instead of pontificating, take ownership by asking yourself, “Instead of stating the obvious, what can I do to fix this?”
III.
Don’t be Hypervigilant
We think being hypervigilant will keep us safe, but being afraid all the time doesn’t protect us from danger.
When we are terrified all the time, we can’t pick out the signal from the noise. If we’re constantly scared, we can’t correctly notice when there is something genuine to fear.
True fear is a momentary signal, not an ongoing state. If one feels fear of all people all the time, there is no signal reserved for the times when it’s really needed.
Fixating on particular dangers blinds us to others. We focus on checking the road for snakes and end up getting knocked over by a car. In fact, what we fear the most is rarely what ends up happening.
Remaining calm is a better strategy because when there’s real fear, our brain is smart enough to warn us in advance to prepare ourselves. Being hypervigilant is counterproductive.
Before You Go…
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I’ll see you next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋
PS: All typos are intentional and I take no responsibility whatsoever! 😬