Every hard project reaches a moment when pushing stops working. We push anyway.
More hours. More meetings. Another pass at the same spreadsheet. We tell ourselves the only alternative to perseverance is quitting, so we grind, and the problem stays exactly where it was.
Tenacity has its place. Some problems only yield to stamina. But stamina and perspective are different, and one doesn’t produce the other. Digging deeper in the same spot gets us to know that spot better. It never shows us the landscape.
Bill Gates understood this well enough to schedule it. Twice a year, in the middle of running Microsoft, he went alone to a cabin for a week to read and think. In 1995, one of those weeks produced “The Internet Tidal Wave” and turned a software company toward the internet.
Henri Poincaré’s version is quieter. He hammered at a mathematical problem until it went dead, left town on a geology trip, forgot about it completely, and the answer arrived as he stepped onto a bus. The work came first. The distance finished it.
Greg McKeown calls this escaping to focus. I like the phrase because it corrects the assumption behind our guilt. Leaving isn’t the opposite of commitment. Sometimes it’s the most committed thing we can do.
For those of us who lead, that’s two jobs. Step away ourselves, then make it safe for our people to do the same. The leader who never leaves teaches everyone that distance is disloyalty. The one who leaves and returns with a new view teaches something better.
The insight is rarely missing. It’s usually crowded out.
When did we last leave the forest long enough to see it?
