Here is the wicked story of the 20th-century technology revolution that may change your resolutions for 2023.
William Shockley was working at AT&T Bell Labs with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain when they came up with the point-contact transistor.
But when Bardeen and Brattain filed the patent, they omitted William Shockley’s name as an inventor. Shockley was so furious that he locked himself up in a room, and did not come out until he had invented another type of transistor – the ‘junction transistor.’
Shockley filed his patent 9 days after Bardeen and Brattain submitted theirs. And that created the modern computer.
Shockley changed the world in just 4 weeks. And what made it possible was single-minded focus and zero distraction.
Would he be able to replicate that feat today, if he had to check his email, Slack, and WhatsApp every few minutes? I think we know the answer.
The way we work today is fundamentally broken.
Yes, we need to collaborate and communicate. But the act of collaboration comes at a cost – you have to stop your work, switch context, and check your emails and messages. And that bursts your focus bubble.
We need both – focus and collaboration. But collaboration always prevails because if you don’t respond to an email, the conversation gets stuck and it becomes a crisis. You are then forced to respond.
On the other hand, if you can’t focus (and say, you don’t invent the next transistor), nobody is any wiser. The problem remains hidden.
Only teams that can balance focus with collaboration will do their best work. Otherwise, we will just be busy and try to compensate by doing late nights.
This is a hard problem but it holds the key to the next productivity revolution. One of the privileges of being an entrepreneur is that I get to work on these hard problems.
Being busy won’t change the world. Deep thinking will.
If you are thinking about resolutions for 2023, how about changing how you work?
– Rajan