Making Hay

Sometimes I'm fast-smart and sometimes I'm slow-smart (the rest is an uninteresting morass of confused incompetence).

The fast-smart part is talent. I can't really account for it.

The slow-smart part — the larger part — is, paradoxically, where I do my best work. Slow-smart really means stupid-but-tenacious. It's a much better faculty, though very few people discover this (I'll explain why in a moment).

The fast stuff is dangerous, and must be closely supervised. It's so facile that it can effortlessly churn out vapidity and wrongness (at age six I announced to my family that "smart people have no sense."). I've trained my slow self to vet my fast output in order to weed out bullshit. Meanwhile, my slow stuff requires no vetting. It's slow because vetting's baked in.

I constantly see people burying their slow sides, steering clear of entire realms to avoid even contemplating it. It strikes me as a tragic waste. I don't avoid butterscotch candy because it takes time to melt. "Painstaking" is good, so intellectual slowness — i.e. stupid tenacity — can be more deeply rewarding. More...intelligent?

Yet people twist themselves into pretzels to avoid contemplating their slow side, much less channeling it. We all want to feel super fast and super sharp.

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It took me 25 years to touch my toes in yoga, while the bendy ectomorphs simply bent over and dropped. I gleaned volumes of wisdom from every millimeter of progress, and now when I perform a forward bend, the vibe in the room changes a little.

See also:
The obscure Vedic story told here
The Infinite Potential of Slow Learners
Samson