Hello Reader,

A few weeks ago I took my son to see the Foo Fighters in Vancouver. It was his first stadium rock show. It was also one of the best I've ever been to, and I've been to a few.

They played for three hours.

Three hours is a long time to do almost anything. We had seats, but some people didn't have that luxury, and they stood through the whole thing. If you'd told me beforehand the set would run that long, some part of me would have winced. And yet when it ended, nobody around us was checking the time or edging toward the exits. They wanted more.

I've been turning that over ever since, and here's where I've landed: if quality has been demonstrated, people will go through quantity for it.

We tend to get that backwards. We treat length as the problem. The meeting ran long. The book was too thick. The episode went past the hour. But length is rarely what we’re objecting to. We’re objecting to length that hasn’t earned its place. Nobody complains about a three-hour set when every song lands. They complain about the forty-minute meeting that should have been an email.

The Foo Fighters have thirty years of songs to draw from. Those three hours weren’t padding. They were built long before any of us walked into the stadium, one record and one tour at a time. The quantity we got that night rested on decades of quality that came first. They’d demonstrated it, so we went along for the ride.

And I’ll tell you, they were in a state of productiveness up there. Nobody was optimizing the setlist for throughput. They were doing what mattered to them, on purpose, with everything they had, for as long as it stayed worth doing. Productivity asks how much you can get out. Productiveness asks whether what you’re putting out is worth the time it takes, yours and everyone else’s.

So productiveness doesn’t forsake quality for quantity. But it doesn’t fear quantity either. When the work is good, more of it can be a gift.

The question isn’t how long something should be. It’s whether you’ve given people a reason to stay.

The Final Flicker

Length is never the problem. Unearned length is.

See you later,
Mike

P.S. Confession: I actually liked the Queens of the Stone Age set more. One hour, some of the hits (not all of them, which I’ll forgive), and not a wasted minute. Turns out quality works at any length.

Thanks for reading. Your time is valuable, and I don’t take it for granted. In a world pulling us in all directions, thanks for choosing The Lantern.