In Rest, I talk briefly about Amos Tversky’s and Daniel Kahneman’s time at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences as an example of a super-productive sabbatical. Tversky and Kahneman had a decades-long collaboration that had a tremendous impact on economics and psychology, and Michael Lewis’ new book The Undoing Project is about that collaboration, its ups and downs, and the great work that came out of it.

One of my favorite lines from the book (first pointed out by economist Richard Thaler, whose book Misbehaving is a great intellectual memoir) is this piece of advice from Tversky:

The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.

Since Tversky was a genius, I don’t feel bad that he was able to say in two sentences what I needed a whole book to say.