by Gary Long

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Some people are morning people. They wake up chipper and chatty, ready to tackle the day. I have trouble liking those people before 9:00 a.m. That makes my favorite 6:30 a.m. friend the brilliantly named “Snooze Button.”

It was in 1956 that General Electric introduced the “Snooz-Alarm.” The engineers wanted the snooze interval to be 10 minutes, but the clock’s gears refused to cooperate. They could manage nine minutes and change or ten minutes and change.

So they chose nine. And that little mechanical compromise became an accidental stroke of genius.

Nearly 70 years later, our iPhones still honor the decision of some weary engineer who simply picked the gear that fit. I did figure out recently that you can tell Alexa to “snooze for 15 minutes.” I thought I was golden until my brain fog that morning verified a scientific fact I recently learned: Ten minutes is apparently long enough for the body to drift back toward deeper sleep, making the “second awakening” something less pleasant than your yet-to-be-walked dog sitting on your head.

Nine minutes lets me procrastinate without completely reentering the womb of drooling sleep. The fog of nine minutes is overcome while brushing my teeth. Sixty extra seconds, and I’m three cups of coffee away from being able to speak politely.

This is how accidental genius often works. We imagine innovation arriving through strategic plans or “vision discernment teams.” And sometimes it does. Other times, somebody encounters a limitation, makes the least-bad decision available, and unknowingly improves civilization.

Churches stumble into this occasionally. The building becomes unavailable, so worship moves outside—and neighbors show up. The budget gets cut, so volunteers take ownership—and discover gifts nobody knew they had. COVID comes along, wrecks everything you planned for at least 24 months, and actual ministry breaks out before anyone can form a task force to stop it.

Not every obstacle is divine intervention. Sometimes a broken gear is merely a broken gear. But limitations have a peculiar way of stripping away our illusions and forcing us to see possibilities we were too comfortable to notice. So when your plan doesn’t work exactly as designed, don’t assume the whole thing has failed. You may be standing at the edge of accidental genius.

Pick the nine-minute gear. Then act like you meant to do it.

Are you a snooze-button pusher? Email me after 9:30 a.m. and let’s chat about it. I’d love to hear your wake-up routine.

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Gary Long is BGAV’s chief marketing officer.

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