Deliberate wandering
Unplanned, inefficient exploration kept on purpose as the counterweight to efficiency
Leaving room for exploration that does not have a known destination. Efficiency is for the work where you already know where you are going; wandering is for invention, where the path is guided by hunches and curiosity and is messy by design. In practice it looks like meetings that run past their slot, mornings that start slowly, and problems worked on without a fixed plan. The bet is that the occasional large, non-linear discovery pays for all the tangents, and that a life or a company run entirely on efficiency never finds one.
Who backs it
Sorted by strength of stance
- Jeff BezosRecommends
Amazon and Blue Origin founder · Six-page memos and eight hours of sleep
Argues in the 2018 letter that wandering is an essential counter-balance to efficiency: not random, but guided by hunch and curiosity, and the likeliest route to the outsized non-linear discoveries. The same letter credits years of wandering, with failed first attempts along the way, for AWS products such as SageMaker.
Source: Amazon 2018 Letter to Shareholders
Aimed at the same thing
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20-slot punch card rule
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