The Blur

I had cataract surgery on one eye last week. The world has been a matter of contours and shadows rather than resolved edges and precise detail.

I couldn’t drive. I have been reading signs at distance, and signs at distance had become impressionist gestures. But for most of what I actually did during the week, the blur was enough. More than enough. There was something almost adventurous about it: the world as sketch rather than photograph. My observation: visual acuity is overrated.

What I noticed was this. I started reading differently. Not worse. I rediscovered a few things: that the shadow a chair casts tells you about its mass and distance; that the quality of light in a room tells you about the time of day and the weather outside; and that sound tells you about speed, approach, and (sometimes) the intention of what is coming toward you. These channels had always been there. The sharp eye, it turns out, had been crowding them out.

And what it crowded out was not detail. It was the reading itself: the capacity to take a shadow, a cast of light, or a sound of approach, and know from them where a thing was going and whether it meant you. The acuity didn’t sharpen that reading. It made it unnecessary, and then it made it absent. You can lose the reading and still see perfectly. You will simply be seeing, with great precision, without knowing what you’re looking at.

Which is the failure I keep meeting in organizational life. Not the obvious one, motion as a substitute for direction or speed as an alibi for the absence of purpose. The other one: knowing exactly how fast you’re going, with perfect precision, in the wrong direction. That the dashboard is accurate and the instruments are calibrated, but the heading is wrong.

This is what the clarity obsession produces: misdirected confidence. We’ve optimized the instruments and retired the judgment that might have questioned the heading. The suppressed channels, the shadows, the quality of the light, the sound of what’s approaching, those were carrying information about direction. We turned them off in favor of resolution.

A cousin of mine fishes off the coast of the Gaspé peninsula. When he’s at the harbor deciding whether to go out, he reads the water, the sky, the shift of the wind, the behavior of birds. He doesn’t distrust meteorology. But he trusts his body’s decades of accumulated reading more than any single forecast, because time has been teaching him things that don’t translate well into instruments.

The meteorologist may never have developed that. Not because she is less intelligent or less observant, but because the instruments arrived before the formation had a chance to happen in her. There was no need. The capacity that necessity would have built was never constituted.

This is the more unsettling version of what we usually say about tools. We say they shape what we receive. That’s true. It’s also insufficient. The deeper claim is that some tools prevent the development of the perceiver who could receive what the tool doesn’t show. It is not eviction. It is prevention. There was never a prior tenant to displace.

Which is why I am unmoved by the social media memes presenting Charlie Munger’s eleven principles or Warren Buffett’s fifteen laws of investing. I don’t doubt the accuracy of the extraction. What I doubt is the premise that extraction is what happened.

When Buffett states a principle, that principle is the surface of something that formed over six decades. It was tested through losses, revised in light of recoveries, confirmed by outcomes he didn’t expect and then understood in retrospect, and discussed with Charlie Munger time and again. What he can articulate is the residue of that formation, not the formation itself. The residue is true. It is also, for someone without the formation, largely inert.

Some investors, on learning that Buffett has taken a position in a company, buy the same stock. They have the rule: follow Buffett. What they don’t have is the sixty years that made the rule meaningful. And what they don’t notice is that the announcement of the position has already moved the price. They are buying the echo of the decision at a price that reflects the decision, which is precisely the wrong price.

Three removes from what mattered: the formation that produced the judgment, the judgment that produced the purchase, and the purchase that produced the price they now face. What they have is the announcement, which is the shadow of a shadow. And they are treating it as the thing itself.

The blur, it turns out, was not a deficit. It was an invitation to read differently, to attend to what the sharp eye, in its confidence, had been excluding.

Precision has costs. The first cost is what you stop noticing. The second is that you stop knowing you’ve stopped.

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