Problem of a slow thinker

During my postdoc at the University of Chicago I shared an office with Tom Wolff. He was already famous, at that early point in his tragically short career, for this.

I was amused at the time by how he didn't seem at all brilliant in social/mathematical interactions, if anything almost the opposite. If you asked him a question on a topic he wasn't prepared for the only thing he ever said was "uh...". But sometimes he'd have an answer the next day, and when that happened it was worth the wait.

Of course, speed is a very desirable skill to have, but in research mathematics what matters most (in my humble opinion) is the depth of one's ideas rather than the speed. Anyways, I will just recite one of my favorite quotes by Alexander Grothendieck (see here for example).

Since then I’ve had the chance, in the world of mathematics that bid me welcome, to meet quite a number of people, both among my “elders” and among young people in my general age group, who were much more brilliant, much more “gifted” than I was. I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas, juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle — while for myself I felt clumsy, even oafish, wandering painfully up an arduous track, like a dumb ox faced with an amorphous mountain of things that I had to learn (so I was assured), things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to the end. Indeed, there was little about me that identified the kind of bright student who wins at prestigious competitions or assimilates, almost by sleight of hand, the most forbidding subjects. In fact, most of these comrades who I gauged to be more brilliant than I have gone on to become distinguished mathematicians. Still, from the perspective of 30 or 35 years, I can state that their imprint upon the mathematics of our time has not been very profound. They’ve all done things, often beautiful things, in a context that was already set out before them, which they had no inclination to disturb. Without being aware of it, they’ve remained prisoners of those invisible and despotic circles which delimit the universe of a certain milieu in a given era. To have broken these bounds they would have had to rediscover in themselves that capability which was their birth-right, as it was mine: the capacity to be alone.

Alexander Grothendieck

Well, apart from many other considerations, there are sectors of mathematics and collateral where slow-thinking is much beneficial. One example for all is programming.