Learning to be successful in life relies on moderating your speed. Too much speed, or too much energy in a given situation can result in explosive acute changes that are sometimes disastrous; by the same token, going too slowly can either increase your risk of a crash (as everything around you moves quickly) or simply mean that you fail to arrive at your destination within a timeframe that is appropriate.
As a younger person I would always try to finish whatever I was doing as quickly as possible, and then without much of a rest or break begin working on another project. This is good in its own right as it indicates a healthy constitution and trains you to be tough-minded; however, most of the time, in any context, working this way is foolish bordering on self-injurious. Imagine applying this formula to seducing a woman; five minutes after you meet her you’ve bought her flowers, five minutes later dinner, and five minutes after that you're expecting to get laid. It generally doesn’t work because the tempo of most things in life, be it a romantic encounter or a business meeting, do not necessitate working at a break neck speed. This sounds obvious but most productive people are addicted to working at high speeds and this type of emphasis on “multitasking” is extremely prevalent in modern working and educational environments. There’s a general expectation that you should have a half dozen or more “cool things” that you’ve checked of each day and that’s fine in and of itself; however, completing that check-list each day often becomes more a matter of social status seeking and validation rather than something that empowers you to lead a good life.
If you are at all like me and you tend to get burnt out after a certain amount of time going as fast as possible, it’s time to learn to moderate your pace. In marathon running, the good runners can run pretty damn fast, unfailingly, for many miles. Life is much more like a marathon than a sprint, or even a one-mile race. In both of those formats one may be carried by an all-encompassing emotional sentiment that suppresses much of the pain and negative emotions that come with a concentrated exertion. In a really long event, like a marathon, or a boxing match, or a football game, there will come portions of the event whereby you would be better served by moderating your efforts. For example, in tennis, it’s widely understood to be mathematically sub-optimal to really “try” on certain points; conversely, when it’s possible to win a game, close a set, or end a match, it really pays to try hard. This is life; most of the time playing at an easy 80% will net you great results, while some of the time you will need to crank things up to and beyond your limit to accomplish your major goals. Also, presumably, there will be times when your environment allows you to dial down to 20 or 0 % and really enjoy life.
Now, the second point where people get tripped up is defining what 80% is. I mean 80% as, 80% within the context of whatever situation you are currently in. 80% of having lunch with your parents is (hopefully) substantially less total effort than having an 80% day as an NFL quarterback (let’s say 250 yards passing or so). So, sometimes the total amount of effort you will need to expend will seem laughably small; this is when life is going “too good” but there are few or no notable developments that really challenge you. Again, if your natural disposition is to race to the finish line each time, you will need to learn to not only slow down but to some extent forget about your larger goal or objective; simply allowing each day to flow into the next with the minimum necessary amount of pain or damage taken.
This is the complete opposite of the “warriors attitude” that must be adopted during truly important scenarios, be they hostile investors at a board meeting or an invasion by a foreign army. However, these type of encounters are at least somewhat rare, although there are certain jobs where they are much more common; most people, however, are not king crab fisherman or F1 drivers or emergency response surgeons or such; most people work in environments that are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between safety/boredom and danger/excitement. My father was a carpenter, and almost every carpenter gets a few bad cuts during their career; however, while you’d guess most of those are caused by the nasty looking saw blades you see everywhere, often they’re the result of a misapplied exacto-knife. Even if you work with dangerous tools, it’s often the slow moments you need to be careful of.
So, how do you know when you are going to fast? For me the best warning sign was always that I began letting small details of whatever task I was engaged in slip from my attention. The best example of this is the steady flow and cadence that is required to maintain a high level of speed and accuracy in dictation or when spot-typing; when you try and force out to many letters too quickly, you begin making mistakes, which drastically reduce the speed of the enterprise. You will save time in a purely numerical sense, not in any type of woo-woo or bogus type way, but actually on the clock, by slowing down and thus significantly reducing the number of mistakes you make in a typical session; this applies to literally everything, from making something on an assembly line (where making mistakes is likely to simply get you fired), to doing creative work that doesn’t operate on a strict time-table.
Comments