Turn Every Page: The Importance of Solitude
It’s an irony of the intellectual life that just as groups of intellectually minded friends can help us expand and improve our thinking, we also need times of solitude to optimize our thinking. Solitude can be the key that opens our minds to new ideas or clearer thinking. And once we have thought deeply, we can be more helpful to others in conversation or in presentations to others.
One label people give to this kind of thinking is “Deep Work,” popularized by Cal Newport in his book of the same name. I highly recommend all of Newport’s books, and his podcast “Deep Questions,” which discuss why and how we can cultivate a deep life. For Newport, “Deep Work” means “[p]rofessional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.” (Cal Newport, Deep Work, (Grand Central Publishing, 2016, at 3).
Newport’s books are generally geared toward knowledge workers, but his insights are equally applicable to other areas. For example, he profiles Adam Marlin, a member of the Knesses Yisroel Synagogue in Spring Valley, New York. Marlin had a goal to “decipher one Talmud page each day” with a study group that meets daily at 6:00 a.m. That deep, daily study of a religious text expanded Marlin’s mental capacity such that he felt better able to dive into difficult material at work.
A key to Marlin’s success was blocking out everything else—even the others gathered in the study group. “Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.” (157) Newport’s advice is to “embrace boredom.” Perhaps another way to say it is to learn how to be ok with silence and solitude.
Judge Raymond Kethledge, a 6th Circuit Court of Appeals judge embraces these practices in his own life. In his book, Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude (Bloomsbury, 2017), Kethledge profiles many historical figures who have used solitude to improve their thinking. (Kethledge also has a TED talk about how he came to this insight.) As an undergraduate, Kethledge took regular walks to think about the material he was learning and to plan out where that might take him professionally. These walks taught him the value of solitude, which he defines as the “condition of being alone with your thoughts, an absence of input from other minds.”
Note Kethledge’s definition. Adam Marlin was, by Kethledge’s definition, in solitude even though he was surrounded by other members of his study group. Being quiet and free from distraction was the key. As Kethledge notes of this kind of focus, “intuition requires mental quietude to break through the surface of conscious thought.” (43) Some are better than others at being silent with their lips and to quiet their minds. Not all of us can be Ulysses S. Grant, “a man who could be silent in several languages,” (106) but we can all strive to quiet our thoughts and voices.
For much of his book, Kethledge uses the examples of great leaders and public figures to illustrate the benefits of solitude. For example, Kethledge cites General Mattis, who said that “[s]olitude can bring on emotional contemplation that allows you to reconcile the human aspect with the more mechanical aspects of our actions, the things we’re required to do. It brings you to a more balanced place to carry out the mission.” (91) This “more balanced” approach to a mission or work or life comes from the perspective you gain in solitude. That “panoramic view” gained through solitude not only gives you the whole picture, it situates your particular action—emotionally, personally—in the broader scheme of things. Abraham Lincoln famously escaped the White House before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation for time in solitude. “That pivotal summer, he found refuge at the Soldiers’ Home, a three-hundred-acre complex in the hills three miles north of the city.” (215) “The Soldiers’ Home provided sanctuary. There, Lincoln recalled, he was able to dwell thoroughly and ‘earnestly on the gravity, importance, and delicacy’ of the subject of slavery.” (215)
Others cycle between solitude for individual thinking and group meetings to learn from others. The recently deceased Charlie Munger had a “Friday lunch club” where he and other regular attendees would share ideas, but Munger also valued solitude because it allowed him to concentrate completely: “He knows how to take all of his brains and all of his energy and all of his thought and focus exactly on a single problem, to the exclusion of anything else. People will come into the room and pat him on the back or offer him another cup of coffee or something, and he won’t even acknowledge their presence because he is using one hundred percent of his huge intellect.” (Glen Mitchel, Munger’s friend since 1957).
Kethledge was, of course, not the first person to laud the power of solitude and deep work. As Zena Hitz reminds us:
In his classic handbook for amateur intellectuals, The Intellectual Life, the Dominican priest A.G. Sertillanges claimed that an intellectual vocation could be lived on two hours of free time a day—and so is compatible with both work and family life. His secular contemporary, Arnold Bennett, claimed in How to Live on 24 Hours a Day that it would suffice to take a daily half hour of focused thinking, combined with three evening sessions a week during which one read seriously for ninety minutes. I think that Bennett and Sertillanges are right—and even beyond what they imagined, one can aim at leisure and use it fruitfully without the full undertaking of an intellectual vocation. Leisure can be savored in a moment, or in a long pause, or in a restful chewing over the events of the day. A weekend in the woods can allow the insight that was gathering, hidden in our daily busyness, to blossom. Despite ancient prejudice against it, manual labor leaves the mind free to ruminate and consider in a way that other forms of labor do not. This is why carpentry, or gardening, or housecleaning can be satisfying in a way that ticking boxes, pushing paper, or thinking through complex but trivial problems is not. (Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought, 37)
The activities Hitz mentions—carpentry, gardening, etc.—are similar to what Kethledge recommends—meditation, exercise, journaling, and other outside work. If someone wants to remain in one place, then the location matters much more. Kethledge himself writes—both books and judicial opinions—in his barn on family property in rural Michigan. It has no internet, a wood burning stove, and a plain pine desk. That sparse and low-tech setup allows Kethledge to focus, and he says that working in the barn is like gaining 20 IQ points simply because he is free from distraction and not tempted by outside distractions.
How can you increase focus and insight through solitude? If you are uncomfortable with solitude, why? Great military leaders and others have used solitude as a force multiplier in their lives. We would do well to use it to a similar advantage in the intellectual life.