Paradox of success: Speed.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
–F. Scott Fitzgerald
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I’ve been thinking about the paradoxes of business success. One of the first that came to mind is the paradox of speed.
We’ve all heard it many times: the pace of life is speeding up. Technologies are adopted faster than ever before. Businesses have to keep accelerating their efforts if they want to be successful.
But experience tells us that the old aphorism “More haste, less speed” still holds true.
When we rush, we make too many mistakes — and not the good ones that teach us, but the dumb ones that get us nowhere. We get sloppy, we get wrung out emotionally, we lose sleep.
When friends and colleagues ask me for advice, the thing I find myself saying most is “SLOW DOWN.”
You don’t have to rush to do the next thing. You can take enough time to think, then act deliberately to do the next smart thing, without succumbing to the hurly-burly.
In my view, it’s not about choosing speed or slowness. I think we need both, hand in hand.
- When I’m thinking about an idea, outlining a blog post, figuring out priorities, et cetera, I try to take my time — because there’s no sense in rushing into sloppy thinking or an avoidable blunder.
- When I’m typing a blog post, most of the time I’m typing as fast as I physically can — because there’s no sense in delay.
In other words, speed only works in certain contexts. In others, the lust for speed is more trouble than it’s worth.
What about you? How do you handle the paradox of success in your work?
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Image by lucianvenutian, used under a CC-Share Alike license.
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3 Comments so far
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Tim, another great post. When I read it, I thought about a video I saw and wrote about a few weeks ago. Here’s a link to the post, http://tinyurl.com/3g7s9w. The short video in the post by journalist Carl Honore does a great job of conveying just what you have written about.
As you have stated, I believe that we have to use our judgment on when we apply speed. Sometimes it makes all the difference, other times it can be fatal (literally).
Keep up the though provoking blog posts!
Thanks for the comment, Roy. I like Honore’s point that it’s about doing things as WELL as possible.
In some cases, that *implies* doing them quickly: I’m thinking of turning a double play in baseball, or offering to help a patron as soon as they walk into your store.
In many other cases, it’s far more important to slow down for the sake of precision or deeper thought. I’ll leave examples of *that* as an exercise for the reader . . .
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