The Man Who Refused to Be Interrupted
Tesla famously worked in isolation for stretches that his contemporaries found alarming. At his laboratory in New York, he would lock himself in for days, refusing visitors, refusing meals brought at the wrong hour, refusing anything that broke the thread of a problem he was pulling on. This wasn't eccentricity for its own sake. Tesla understood, before neuroscience had the vocabulary for it, that deep concentration is not a state you can re-enter cheaply. Every interruption costs you not just the minutes lost but the warm-up time to return to the same depth of thought.
