When I took over the responsibilities of my current job from my predecessors, I took on the task of updating a monthly publication full of charts and tables. This monthly publication was about 50 pages long but to update it, I had to manually update about 60 files in eight or nine different folders and then manually copy the results into a Word file. My predecessor took about three to four days each month to create this publication. That is roughly 20% of your monthly work spent on mindlessly updating files and copy-pasting charts and tables!

-In most fields creative production increases steadily from the 20s to the late 30s and early 40s then gradually declines thereafter, although not to the same low levels that characterized early adulthood. Peak times of creative achievement also vary from field to field. The productivity of scholars in the humanities (for example, that of philosophers or historians) continues well into old age and peaks in the 60s, possibly because creative work in these fields often involves integrating knowledge that has crystallized over the years. By contrast, productivity in the arts (for example, music or drama) peaks in the 30s and 40s and declines steeply thereafter, because artistic creativity depends on a more fluid or innovative kind of thinking. Scientists seem to be intermediate, peaking in their 40s and declining only in their 70s. Even with the same general field, differences in peak times have been noted. For example, poets reach their peak before novelists do, and mathematicians peak before other scientists do.

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Most humans develop their most important and original ideas between their late twenties and early forties. With the teens and twenties spent gaining the intellectual tools and foundational knowledge needed to take on big problems, the sweet spot for original intellectual work is a person’s 30s: these are the years in which they have already gained the training necessary to make a real contribution to their chosen field but have not lost enough of their fluid intelligence to slow down creative work.

It is hard to go back to the rap and scrabble of real research when you have climbed so high above it. Penguin will pay you a hefty advance for your next two hundred pages of banal boilerplate; they will not pay you for two or three years of archival research on some narrow topic no one cares about.

If you are an intellectual, the sort of person whose work consists of generating and implementing ideas, then understand you are working against time. Figure out the most important intellectual problem you think you can help solve and make sure you spend your thirties doing that. Your fifties and sixties are for teaching, judging, managing, leading, and dispensing with wisdom. Your teens and twenties are for gaining skills and locating the problems that matter to you. Your thirties are for solving them.

I think the lesson of 1914-1918 was that firearms had developed to a large extent in terms of volume and precision - you know, machine guns, artillery, things like that.

But, tactics in terms of maneuver were largely unchanged from like Greco roman times. It was dudes walking across the ground [into] machine gun fire, like that's a really bad place to be. The defense is gonna win every time. Literally they had to go underground to survive.

So fast forward 20 years later and in the 1920 and 1930s, you have innovations in cars, mechanized vehicles, and all of a sudden tanks which have been sort of an interesting idea have now become a centerpiece of warfare. The Germans are able to integrate this together with airplanes which have also become like a real thing and communications.

Then you have [[blitzkrieg]] and being the defender sitting in a trench is like a really bad place to be when you're being run over by this offensive juggernaut.