The crickets had just started to chirp peacefully outside the dining room window as I lay on the couch, knees up, watching something on my laptop. I can’t remember exactly what it was — maybe Kyrie Irving highlights — but I know that I wasn’t engrossed. Whatever I was watching was just filling space, occupying time until bedtime came around. That’s just how some nights went after work and dinner in 2019. And the relaxing if uneventful evening probably would have continued just like that, if a certain itch hadn’t made me open a new tab.
If you ask someone how they learned what they know in their field of work, the answers you would typically hear revolve around formal education like university and informal education like learning on the job. In terms of total knowledge gained, these learning paths usually progress along constant upward trajectories. In university, you start with easier introductory classes and advance to harder ones, hopefully improving your knowledge and skills enough so that when you look three or four years back, you’re quite a way ahead of where you started. On the job, the path is less organised, and your learning is likely more frontloaded, but nonetheless it is a constant increase of aptitude and fluency that amounts over time to something substantial.
For many people the answer is both, myself included. But one type of learning is missing here, and it’s one that I have reflected on many times since that 2019 evening. I call these baptisms of fire. And while I’m loath to use violent anthropomorphoses for work-related activity (think “in the trenches”), I haven’t been able to come up with a better name, so I’m sticking with it.
A baptism of fire — in the way I mean it — is a short and continuous period of time where you work obsessively on something when that you probably shouldn’t. On that 2019 evening, that meant opening a new tab on my laptop and thinking that I’ll just spend half an hour trying to figure out that Google Sheets formula for a spreadsheet I was building at work. But eventually the crickets stopped chirping and the clock moved from double digit hours to single, and there I was, still hammering away at the damned formula, throwing myself and my good night’s sleep into the fire.
Throughout the hours of far-from-perfect ergonomic activity, my search history included things like “sheets filter function unknown column”, “sheets get column letter from value”, “sheets filter function toggle all sometimes”, and other such technical non-sentences. And by the time I finally closed my laptop and crept into bed, lamenting how few hours I had until my alarm and berating my lack of discipline, the formula did work and there were no errors and I had made abundant progress on the spreadsheet. And in doing so, I had rapidly learned a lot. I had probably covered five new functions (sometimes you need to chain several obscure functions together to do something you want), learned more about how Google Sheets works under the hood, and benefited from the osmosis that only six hours of flow can give you.
But I didn’t feel very good, because the work had been obsessive and crazed, and it hadn’t come from a healthy place. If you have a 9-5 style job, you shouldn’t be choosing to work outside those hours. If you are forced to by deadlines, an imbalanced work culture, or an overreaching boss, that’s one thing. I thankfully did not suffer from that trifecta, and yet there I was, doing it anyway.
In the seven years of my professional life, I’ve probably had about ten to fifteen such nights, and they all follow a similar pattern. A quiet evening after a less-than-fulfilling day, an unfinished and stimulating task waiting at work, a laptop within reach, and an itch that says “just do a bit”. I thought that spending half an hour accomplishing something discrete and productive after a disappointing day would fill some void in me and give me the equilibrium I craved. But after the second or third time, I knew that the void was far deeper than a bite-sized achievement could reach. Sometimes I’d resist the temptation, but on other nights it was just too strong. And once I moved on from spreadsheets to coding, the phenomenon metastasised; fixing errors in code — known as debugging — can sometimes take several hours, even for what seems to be a relatively small issue.
So besides my years of university and good ol’ learning on the job, the trendline of my career knowledge progression is also stamped by these intermittent baptisms of fire. There are some things I know now that I simply would not if not for those nights of uninterrupted and frenzied work. They felt like flow because I was completely engaged, to the point where I believed that if I stopped before finishing, my train of thought would be irrevocably expunged. I wasn’t doing any meta-level work like taking notes or thinking about what tomorrow-me needed. I was wholly given over to the task at hand and absorbed in a soundproof bubble. And how often during the day do you get opportunities for work like that?
Yet each baptism was mingled with regret when I reflected soon after on why I had really opened the laptop and from the knowledge that I had done so eyes wide open, not even fooling myself, but outright lying that it would be quick and fulfilling. And even when I finished for the night, there was no soothing exhale of contentment, just a wretched ache from hunching over a screen with muscles and mind unknowingly clenched. Sometimes I would literally not move for these long stretches. Not to check my phone. Not to go to the bathroom. Not to walk around and take a break. Nothing. And so the physical toll was handsomely paid.
How, then, do I judge baptisms of fire? Are they necessary for today's knowledge worker? Are they something to be proud of?
What I’ve come up with is that I would not prescribe them, and I would not proscribe them. I would not tell someone to try to get into some flow state of work late at night. It’s not something I think you can actively seek out; the work has to be available in such a way that a baptism is possible (in some fields this never happens at all), but more so, it has to come from within, and as I’ve said, I don’t believe it came from the healthiest place in me. But if such a feeling does arise in you, I wouldn’t flat out say “don’t do it” or “go to bed”, because I know I wouldn’t be where I am today without those rare pockets of bursty knowledge gain that came in the wee hours.