Perspective-Seconds

April 16, 2025

I was talking with a coworker about a weird indexing algorithm. I asked, "Why do we need this algorithm in the first place? What problem are we solving?" They explained that it helps with fast random-access indexing. It clicked when I realized the utility by connecting it to some related benchmarking I happened to do several years back.

For the holidays, someone got me a puzzle to balance seven nails on one slot. After messing with it for a moment, I saw what to do. I remembered demonstrations of structures self-balancing around their center of mass when I was first learning engineering.

During my last performance review, I got a lot of feedback. On the surface a lot of it felt vague, but I'd read about related ideas before. Once I dug them up again, they gave me context on the issues I was hearing and actionable steps to deal with them.

In a manner resembling Godwin's Law, discussions about seniority in careers tend to bring up the line that "there's a difference between 5 years of experience and 1 year of experience 5 times." Taken at face value, this implies that experience is really measured in units of experience-time. Avoiding recursion and emphasizing the present, I call that unit Perspective-Seconds.

The Role of Perspective

In Ask Easy Questions, I wrote that "people have such diverse ideas, experiences, wit, and recent encounters that whatever you think of when presented with a new idea is virtually guaranteed to be slightly different from what anyone else thinks in the same position." In fact, these differences are so normal that it's cross-culturally called out when two thought processes align out loud. At the time I said that these elements are the source of creativity.

Put another way, I think that creativity is sourced by perspective. It's not straightforward to explain how this happens, but it's easy enough to demonstrate. Try naming a specific beach. If you grew up or lived near a beach, you may have thought of that one. If not, maybe you thought of a tourism destination or perhaps a scene from some movie. If you did this exercise with someone else, how likely are the two of you to have picked the same one? Or, playing detective, what factors may have driven you to think of the specific beach you thought of?

This same process happens with problem-solving.

I think this diagram covers a lot of ground on how I think about learning. "Feedback" is at the center as the output of this system. Here, "feedback" means "any result of some action that is correlated with that action." Focusing on the less-obvious links:

• Perspective on its own is a source of feedback. The prolific mathematician Alexander Grothendieck once described his work as scattering walnuts on a beach: while other mathematicians worked to pick at one walnut, examine it, feel it, and find the best method to open it, he would just keep walking around until he saw one open. The connections between your experiences have a habit of accumulating over time and creating revelations without conscious effort.
• Feedback provides a lens with which to focus on different areas of your perspective. You have a lot of life experiences, a knapsack of techniques or lessons shared by different sources. It's hard to pick out specific ones to focus on until feedback helps to magnify the bits that are important in the moment.

Intuitively, we can feel that perspective comes from learning. It's repeatedly framed in posts like Zane Bitter's Senior Engineers are Living in the Future, Andrew Bosworth's Listening is The Job, or Ryans01's No Zero Days. It's also shared with an emphasis on the exponential nature of learning in the first several chapters of Edmond Lau's The Effective Engineer.

Following Grothendieck, I think that it's also important to include exploration as part of the learning process. As a mentor, I've found the best-performing students are those that are willing to take detours while learning, as opposed to those who are strictly after the most efficient route. When it comes to building a versatile body of experience to work from, shortcuts for efficiency are only cheating one's future self for marginal gains in the present.

The question remains: where do we find the time to build experience? Who has time to go exploring when we have work to get done?

In Search of Lost Time

Momo by Michael Ende is a book about the titular Momo's journey to recover stolen time from the Grey Men. It's fun, it's pithy, and it's one of my favorite books of all time. The Grey Men act through the language of saving time: they convince the city's adults, individually, that wasting any of the roughly 2.511×10⁹ seconds they have on frivolous activities is pointless. Seconds of kindness or curiosity saved here or there allowed efficiency, which leads to yet more scrutiny of any remaining time wasted.

People never seemed to notice that, by saving time, they were losing something else. No one cared to admit that life was becoming ever poorer, bleaker and more monotonous. The ones who felt this most keenly were the children, because no one had time for them any more. But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. And the more people saved, the less they had.

It took some time for this idea to show its presence in the way I operated at work. I had these wonderful Lockhart-inspired ideas on how engineering was truly a creative journey, but it felt like a slider where my choices were either "spend time learning useless information" or "abandon all sense of artistry."

This post is really a thank-you letter to Michael Froh, the one whose explainer I linked at the start. He showed me where I want to be on that slider: filled with a storytelling attitude and passion for the craft that still radiates after nearly two decades in the business. To me, he's the one who's stolen his time back and has the demonstrable results to show that it's viable to do so.

I chose the time unit of "seconds" because I realized that so many of the moments that impacted me most were really rather short. They often are brief epiphanies buried in mountains of noisy context. When I leverage experience to interpret feedback or solve problems, it usually is in the form of remembering a specific moment.

It also emphasizes actionability: on a slow day, it's always possible to take a moment to reflect, to set an intention, to read something, or to simply write some ideas in a notebook. The perspective-seconds add up.