And yet, in my career, I've noticed the rewards are increasing for being the person who is willing to focus on one thing for a long time (for several weeks, or months). For instance, I've never been the kind of software developer who could write obviously clever code. But I have written code that was admired and praised, and sometimes seen as the salvation of the company I was working for -- but not because I'm especially skilled as a software developer, but only because I was willing to think about specific problems, deeply, for longer than anyone else at the company. In 2012/2013, to the extent that I helped re-invent the tech stack at Timeout.com, it was because I was willing to spend weeks thinking about exactly why we'd reached the limits of what we could do with various cache strategies, and then what would come next. I then introduced the idea of "an architecture of small apps" which was the phrase I used because the phrase "microservices" didn't really become widespread until Martin Fowler wrote his essay about it at the very end of of 2013. Likewise, I now work as the principal software architect at Futurestay.com, and my main contribution has been my willingness to spend weeks thinking about the flaws in the old database schema, and what we needed to do to streamline our data model and overcome the tech debt that built up over the 7 years before I was hired. We live in a world where there are large economic rewards for the kinds of people who are willing to think about one thing, deeply, for weeks and weeks or even months and months, until finally understanding a problem better than anyone else.

I have to hope some young people eventually escape the attention-sucking technologies that try to sabotage their concentration, and eventually discover the satisfactions of thinking about complex problems, continuously, for months and months and months.