Two Predictions About You
I’m going to go out on a limb with two predictions:
- Your professional success is largely due to an algorithm you master without knowing it.
- You’re worried that your kids apparently don’t use it.
The first one is correct. The second… well, it might not be the problem you think it is.
The algorithms are called Breadth First Search (BFS) and Depth First Search (DFS). Even if they don’t ring a bell, I guarantee they’re old friends. Your brain has been using them for millions of years.
Chess and the Library of Babel
Imagine you’re a computer playing chess. Your opponent just made a move. How do you decide your next play?
One option: you calculate all your possible moves. Each one generates a new board. For each board, you calculate all possible responses from your opponent. And so on, until you find a path that leads you to victory.
The result is a gigantic tree of possibilities. Something like Borges’ Library of Babel: infinite hallways with infinite books containing every possible combination of letters.
The Perfect Metaphor for Combinatorial Explosion
In case you’re not familiar with the reference: Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine writer from the 20th century, considered one of the most influential in world literature. In 1941 he published The Library of Babel, a short story describing an infinite library.
The library contains all possible books of 410 pages. All of them. Those that make sense and those that don’t. Every combination of letters, spaces, and punctuation marks you can imagine exists on some shelf. This includes the cure for cancer, the biography of every person who will ever exist, and also millions of books that are pure incomprehensible noise.
The obvious problem: how do you find something useful in that ocean of possibilities? Most books are garbage. And there’s no catalog.
Chess has the same problem. After just 4 moves per side, there are more than 288 billion possible positions. The tree of possibilities grows exponentially until it becomes unmanageable. It’s your own Library of Babel, where most “books” (possible games) are absurd, but somewhere lies the perfect game.
How do you traverse that almost infinite tree? The same way you navigate through a world saturated with information: with BFS or DFS.
BFS: The Art of Quick Elimination
Breadth First Search traverses the tree level by level. First you look at everything on the first level, then everything on the second, then the third.
The idea isn’t to find the perfect solution immediately. It’s to rule out branches that don’t look promising as quickly as possible.
When you search for a restaurant on Google and filter by reviews, price, and distance, you’re doing BFS without knowing it. You don’t analyze each restaurant in depth. You discard 90% in seconds and end up with three or four candidates.
DFS: The Laser That Cuts Through Everything
Depth First Search is the opposite. You choose a path and follow it to the end. Only when you reach a dead end do you backtrack and try another route.
Have you ever gotten so deep into a problem that you lost track of time? That flow state is pure DFS: all your cognitive resources focused on one thing until you reach the bottom.
It’s the way great scientific discoveries have been made, technological inventions created, works of art that endure. Absolute depth. Total focus.
DFS Got You Where You Are
If you’re over 35 and reasonably successful in your career, you probably owe a lot to DFS.
Those of us who started working 20 or 30 years ago lived in a world where information was scarce. You had to squeeze every book, every course, every mentor dry. The winning strategy was to go as deep as possible into your branch of knowledge.
That’s why we value concentration, focus, sustained attention so much. Our minds evolved to function like a laser: all energy focused on a single point.
And that’s why we worry—and find it unnatural—about today’s culture of scattered attention. Especially when we see it in our kids.
Plot Twist: Your Kids Aren’t Broken
Here comes the plot twist.
The enemy is no longer information scarcity. It’s information overabundance. We live in Borges’ Library of Babel, with infinite shelves impossible to traverse.
To survive this saturation, many young people have instinctively developed a BFS approach: quickly discard what doesn’t fit, dedicate resources only to what’s promising, jump between options until finding the one worth pursuing.
As David Epstein says in Range, this ability to “broaden your view” before going deep is a competitive advantage in a world that demands constant adaptation.
We might not be looking at degeneration. It might be natural selection doing its job, shaping brains to succeed in an infinite library.
The Balance We Need
The trick isn’t choosing between BFS and DFS. It’s knowing when to use each one.
BFS at the beginning, when options are multiple and you need to filter. DFS afterward, when you’ve identified something that deserves your complete attention.
Those of us from the world of absolute focus might need to learn from the new “generalists.” And they, at some point, will have to develop the ability to go deep.
The future doesn’t belong to pure specialists or pure generalists. It belongs to those who know how to switch modes according to context.
When was the last time you consciously changed algorithms? Maybe it’s a good time to try it.