Moving slower means that we are able to focus on what matters. I think most of us would agree with that. If you move more slowly, you can bring attention to what you're looking at or what you're listening to. Slowing down allows us to kind of template each piece or kind of chunk of what we're consuming, what we're receiving, and as opposed to just kind of ingesting it, so to speak, we are thinking about it.
We are kind of rotating it in our minds and thinking about it from different angles, as though every little piece that comes our way again, whether we're listening or reading something or whatever it is, or just contemplating life, every little bit that comes in can be thought about in different ways, placed into different kind of contexts. And the more we do that, then presumably the better we understand it.
So I think most of us would accept that moving slower means we can focus more effectively on what matters versus moving more quickly. If we kind of just blast through something, there's a good chance that we didn't comprehend or understand that thing as well as we would have if we had gone slower. Moving slower means we can focus more effectively on what matters versus moving more quickly.
But what we can also say, and what I think is definitely true, is that moving fast is a signal for figuring things out. What I mean by that is, think about when you get good at something. When you tend to get good at something, you move faster, you move more quickly at it, you have better muscle memory, you have better kind of mental constructs in your mind about how things work, you just do it more quickly.
If you're consulting and what maybe used to take you a long time, maybe 510 years ago, is now almost seamless because you've done something so many times, you can now, whatever it is you're consulting is kind of bring that solution to people quite effectively, or building software, or playing a musical instrument. Whatever it is, the more you do it, the better you get at it.
There is brevity there, and I think that it's very true that when we tend to, or when we do move fast at something, it tends to be a signal that we're getting better at it. And that means we're figuring something out. Even if it's kind of internal, even if we don't have explicit labels for how it's going better, we must be getting better at something. And because of that, there is a kind of truth to brevity.
Brevity speed is a way that nature kind of tells us you're on the right track, you're figuring things out because they're moving. They're moving far more quickly than they were when you were first learning. And so if we take those kind of two main premises, one, that moving slower means we can focus on what matters. But two, moving fast is a signal for figuring things out. And I think that leads to the conclusion that we should find the slowness that moves us.
In other words, it kind of sets up a bit of a paradox. We're seeing the benefit of both moving slow and going fast. Moving slow seems to be a deeper, more reflective, pensive, contemplative mode to be in. And we can understand there's benefits to being like that. But moving fast is kind of nature's way of telling us that we're on the right track, things are going better. And so to kind of bring those both together, I would argue that what we need to do is try to find the slowness that moves us.
There must be a way to slow down, to do a more comprehensive, deeper type of work, but in a way that makes us better, which would be signaled by brevity, which would be signaled by moving through our environment more effectively with whatever it is that we're doing. And if that's true, that we should find the slowness that moves us, then we should move slowly and expect brevity. We should move slowly and expect brevity.
In other words, whenever you have a paradox, you can really only kind of take one side. It's not like I can both move slow and move fast. That doesn't make sense. So what I'm going to argue is that to make this work, that we should choose moving slowly, but expect brevity as the signal that we're on the right track. And I'm going to argue later on that that's actually a sign that you are improving or developing a very good technique in your life.
If you can slow down, but at the same time see things go more quickly, that you are figuring out something fundamental about nature, about processes, and you're applying those successfully in your life. It's like a heuristic. If you can choose something that is slower, but it ends up moving you more quickly, that slowness moves you, you're on the right track. Okay, so one, moving slower means we can focus on what matters.
But two, moving fast is a signal for figuring things out, and therefore, we should find the slowness that moves us. And if that's the case, we should choose to move slowly and expect brevity. So let's pick these apart now and start with that. First point, moving slower means we can focus on what matters. Well, is that true? Is moving slower giving us truly the ability to focus on what matters? Let's think about the first point here.
Moving slow means you notice things and can contemplate them, right? So as an example, imagine someone embarking on a journey and they're going to explore a new city. Instead of rushing from one tourist attraction to another. Let's imagine this person decides to take a leisurely stroll through the streets, right?
Well, if they do that, it's maybe not as efficient, right, but what it is is that they're observing the local culture, they're interacting with residents, and they're just, by and large, savoring the details of their surroundings, right? So someone goes, embarks on a journey to explore a brand new city. You can do that quickly and kind of rush through it. Maybe you hit all the hotspots, the parts that people are going to put on Instagram or something, because they want their picture in front of.
Maybe they want their picture in front of the Mona Lisa and they want the picture in front of the Vatican. Whatever new city to them that they're exploring, they want to get all the hotspots, hey, look, what you know, or the other option is to just take a lot more time, get off the beaten track, immerse yourself in the culture. Maybe you don't get all those kind of quote unquote Instagram shots, but you get something more important.
Your learning about that city is a lot deeper because you're going beyond what you could just get by going online and looking at images of this city in the first place, right? So I think moving slow definitely means that we notice things and can contemplate them. I think that makes sense to most people. Now, another point is that what about what matters, right? Because I said moving slower means we can focus on what matters. So we've got moving slower means we notice things and contemplate them.
But what does that have to do with things that matter? Well, what matters takes more time to comprehend than things that are trivial, right? So while the definition of what matters obviously can vary, right, based on individual perspectives, values and context, what matters often are things that contribute to well being. Right. Or personal fulfillment and a sense of purpose.
And if you think about those things, right, well being, personal fulfillment, a sense of purpose, those things take a long time to work out, right? I mean, I'm sure we've all thought many times throughout our life, what is our purpose? What are we supposed to be doing? Working on what's our identity, maybe in the complete literal sense, like what is my job and what do people know about me and what's my label, I guess to kind of more meaning of life type stuff, right?
Where what is going to be truly fulfilling? When I'm on my deathbed and I look back at life, will I be able to say, yes, that's what I was supposed to be doing? You found it, right? I found it. So I think it's also true that what matters takes more time to comprehend than things that are trivial. It's part of the human experience to contemplate those for years and years.
And hopefully you're getting closer and closer to understanding things that contribute to your well being, your personal fulfillment, and your sense of purpose. But that's a long journey. And things like well being, personal fulfillment, sense of purpose. To kind of sum that up, they have to be contemplated to develop. Right? Let's pick that apart a bit. I mean, is that true? Why would it take more time to think about these things? Well, there's clarity around values, right?
It takes time to get the clarity there, to kind of shovel some of the superfluous stuff out of the way and get at the essence of your sense of purpose, of your personal fulfillment, right? There's goal setting, and those goals can change throughout your life. Or sometimes the goals at a high level stay the same. But some of the more specifics about how you go about achieving them could definitely change, right? I'm sure they do.
Decision making, your adaptability as an individual, there's just all kinds of self discovery and discovering meaning and what meaning means to you, right. A lot of that involves connection to others, right? Maybe being involved in some kind of community or just connecting with family and friends that kind of help you either deliberately or not on that journey because you need to kind of share information and get into these conversations, as per my last episode. Right?
So if we accept those three points, that one, moving slow means you notice things and can contemplate them. And two, what matters takes more time to comprehend than things that are trivial. And three, things like well being, personal fulfillment, sense of purpose must be complicated, sorry, contemplated in order to develop. Then you can kind of reach the conclusion there that moving slower means we can focus on what matters, as per the first main point of my argument.
And so if that's true, that moving slower means we can indeed focus on what matters, then we should try to find ways to move more slowly in our day to day work, right. We should try to find ways to move slowly because there seems to be a lot of benefit to doing so. Now, the second main point that I mentioned at the beginning was that moving fast is a signal for figuring things out. So let's pick this one apart a bit.
Well, the first point I want to make is we know we're getting better at something when we can do it faster. Okay? So imagine, like, learning to type on a keyboard, right? Most of us can type fairly effectively because we're using our computers all the time. And if you can remember back to when you were first learning to type, obviously it was kind of clumsy. It may have been at school, you may have be kind of self taught. But it took a bit to get those fingers working correctly on the keyboard.
But eventually we started to move fast. Right? And moving fast isn't just about kind of doing it better and being more effective. It's telling you that your brain has obviously figured something out about the coordination of fingers matching to the kind of needed actions to take on a keyboard. Right? There's some truth to it. There's some truth to the brevity. It was a signal.
I mean, if you went a whole year trying to practice on the keyboard and nothing got any quicker, then you would say, well, you're not getting better at it. You wouldn't think you're getting better at it, because when I look at the keyboard, I kind of can see where the letters are, and I'm more familiar with it. No, the only signal that you would be actually getting better is in the brevity is in the speed at which you do it. And I think that's true for just about anything in life, right?
Moving fast is a signal for figuring things out. So, .1, we know we're getting better at something when we can do it faster, .2 we often get really good at things without being able to truly explain how. So go back to that keyboard example. How are our fingers moving faster across the keys? Or how come I can now play that piano song without thinking about it? Whereas learning it involved a laborious process and lots of determination.
We all know that feeling in one way or another, whatever it is you are trying to get better at when you first start, we know that it's a bit of a painful process. There's that learning curve. You're thinking about everything kind of in these kind of discrete units of action that you're supposed to take, either because someone told you this is how you type or play a piano, or that's just how humans kind of break apart problems, right?
We do it into chunks, and then we try to get good at the individual chunks and then just kind of hope that there's some synthesis of those chunks down the road. And there is, if we get better at it, we do achieve that synthesis. But once you've achieved it, you almost forget what learning it was like. It kind of becomes something, especially if it's a fairly complex task.
It becomes something that just kind of holistically melds together into an ability where you almost don't even know how you're doing it. And I think that's the sign of a really good skill, is when you reach the point that you can no longer explain it to yourself or to others because your mind has figured something out. It has synthesized those details into something new, something that the individual details could not possibly have communicated.
So we often get really good at things without being able to truly explain how we do them. And so if we take those two points, one, we know we're getting better at something when we can do it faster, like learning to type a keyboard. And two, we often get really good at things without being able to explain them. Then moving fast must be a signal for figuring things out. So by signal, I mean, it's something that's coming from the environment.
It's like a feedback in contrast to something like an explanation or a reason, right? I mean, you can imagine if you feel you're really overweight and all of a sudden you start dropping the pounds, that's a signal that you're probably doing something good, assuming you're not starving and stuck on an island or something.
But in the everyday course of life, if you made different changes to your diet and the pounds didn't come off, then you wouldn't have the signal that you were looking for, right? But if it worked because the pounds were dropping off, that would be a signal that you're doing something right now. You still might not know what that is. You still might not really have the reason.
There could be all kinds of different factors, and maybe it was something you didn't even realize that was kind of going on in the background, or you chose a different diet. And maybe you think it must be that new food that's making you lose weight, but maybe it's actually you're leaving a bunch of other food out because the new diet just doesn't include it. And so the causality is not necessarily what you think it is, but the signal is there, right?
And that you can use this for anything in life, right? The environment provides us signals as to when we're on the right track. And those are often more effective. It's usually more effective to pay attention, I would argue, to signals than to reasons. I call that properties over reasons or signals over reasons. Right, because the causality is something that in some sense, we never really have access to, but you do have access to the signal.
So when I say, one, we know we're getting better at something when we can do it faster, and two, we often get really good at things without being able to explain them, then moving fast must be a signal for figuring things out. And if that's true, that moving fast is a signal for figuring things out, then we should look for brevity as the signal that we are on the right track when it comes to getting better at things.
Brevity is that signal, and I alluded this towards this at the beginning when I said we've got this kind of paradoxical argument that I'm making, that we should find the slowness that moves us. But you can't have both sides of a paradox. And so if you only choose one, one has to be the action, the other has to be the signal, the thing to expect. And if you learn to look for that and expect it, it could be a powerful signal that you are on the right track.
So moving fast is a signal for figuring things out. And if that's true, we should look for gravity as that signal when it comes to getting better at things. And so this leads to this kind of ultimate argument that I'm making in this episode, is that we should find the slowness that moves us. So getting better at anything we know requires us to search and refine our methods, right? So let's use another example.
You consider an individual who is working to improve their strength and overall fitness, let's say. And at the beginning, they might kind of adopt a generic workout routine, right? But as they progressed, they realize the need to refine their approach and get better results. And this can involve a number of things.
Maybe they research different techniques, they analyze personal progress, they seek expert guidance, they start to adapt to their individual needs, which might stand in contrast to what other or even most people are doing. They experiment with different strategies. Right? So I think most of us would agree, just in general, that getting better at anything does require us to search and refine our approach.
And because of that, when we talk about the slowness that moves us, this is why we need to find the slowness that moves us. And if that's the case, that we need to find the slowness that moves us. Right. This is kind of setting up what it is we're supposed to go after here, then we need a way to get good at finding slow things, which are like techniques, methods, approaches, mindsets that end up moving us more quickly.
Okay, so let's do a bit of a recap here before I move into kind of what can we do about this? I said at the beginning, the big argument that I'm making in this episode is that we need to find the slowness that moves you. And to back that up, my first point, I said, look, moving slower, we can say that that means we're going to focus on what matters. And most of us would probably accept that at face value.
But just to kind of argue that a little more in depth, I said, one, moving slow means you notice things and contemplate them. Gave that example of someone embarking on a journey in a brand new city, right? Can kind of do all the hotspots and take those pictures, or you can kind of slow down, immerse yourself in the local culture. And I said too, what matters takes more time to comprehend than things that are trivial, right?
Even though the definition of what matters can change, they always seem to ultimately have to do something with well being, personal fulfillment, and a sense of purpose. And if you take those things well being, personal fulfillment, sense of purpose, they have to be contemplated to develop. You need clarity around your values. You need goal setting, decision making, adaptability, a good level of self discovery, understand what meaning is, what it means to you and connection to others.
So therefore, moving slower means we can focus on what matters, right? And so obviously, we need to find ways to move slowly in our work. And then I said to the main point, to argue that we should find the slowness that moves us. I said that moving fast is a signal for figuring things out. So it sounds like a bit contrast, right? But one, we know that we're getting better at something when we can do it faster, right? Learning the keyboard, playing the piano.
And two, we often get really good at things without being able to explain them. And so I said, ultimately, look, moving fast is a signal for figuring things out. And if that's the case, then we should look for brevity as the signal that we're on the right track when it comes to getting things done. And so we should find the slowness that moves us. One, getting better at anything requires us to search and refine our methods.
And so we have to find this slowness that gives us the signal of brevity as kind of the hallmark that we're on the right track. Right? So this would really come down to getting good at finding things like the techniques, methods, approaches, mindsets that you could do slowly to comprehend them, to contemplate them, to really know them deeply, but so that they give you the signal of brevity such that they move you.
Okay, so if that's true, that we should find the slowness that moves us, then we should move slowly and expect brevity. Okay, so just to kind of argue this, taking an action when the truth lies in paradox. Well, one think about the fact that truth often does lie in paradox. There's all kinds of examples in the world, and maybe all truth really has a paradoxical kind of side to it. When something is nontrivial and it's deep and profound, it's not going to be obvious.
On the surface, that lack of obviousness often comes across as a kind of paradox. So think, for example, in leadership, let's say individuals are often expected to project confidence and decisiveness, right? Have a clear sense of direction. But the most successful leaders also recognize the importance of humility. You see that a lot. Successful leaders understand that they don't have all the answers, right? Or the answers don't exist, as per the last episode.
And they value input and collaboration from their team members. Things like conversation, right? So even though you might think of leadership as well, maybe it's someone who really needs to portray confidence and decisiveness and clear sense of prediction. A direction, really, what you see more than anything is the most effective leaders, whether this is political or in business or anything, even a family, they have this strong sense of humility about them.
They open themselves up to the conversation to input and collaboration, and that's what really makes them effective. It's not some overbearing personality or self confidence or whatever that is. I mean, confidence really, if anything, comes as a byproduct of being humble. So we got that point. Another point is that we can only really take action on one side of a paradox, as I mentioned towards the beginning. Right?
So it makes more sense to focus on humility than to go out of your way to look confident with this leadership example. And that's more likely to show as a natural byproduct of being humble. So, in other words, if you had two choices, someone said, look, if you want to be a really good leader, you have to be super confident and self assured, but you also have to be really humble. And that is true. There is truth in that paradox.
But it is kind of a paradox, because those sound like those are kind of at ods with each other, at least on the surface it sounds paradoxical, but it's in some sense not really a paradox if you understand that one of those sides of the paradox is the action you choose and the other is a byproduct.
And the action that you should choose is that humility is to be humble, to open yourself up to conversation, don't act like you have all the answers, and that, as a byproduct, will give you a level of confidence seen by both yourself and others of the genuine kind. Okay, so even though truth often presents itself as paradox, it doesn't mean you go do both things. It usually means you do one of them and you get the other as a byproduct. Okay?
So if we should find the slowness that moves us, then we should move, which is the action we take slowly, move slowly and expect, which is the natural byproduct, brevity. And that would be the sign of a good technique. And actually had a tweet here not too long ago where I said a simple heuristic for finding a better technique is to ask yourself how you could move more slowly while getting it done sooner. And I think a lot of people kind of do one or the other.
They say, well, I guess I'm just going to slow down because I know that's better, which is in some sense true, but then they don't get anything done and they just kind of do everything slow.
And then maybe they try to justify, oh, well, I'm going deep, and things take a long time, but then you're missing the signal that the world tells you things are going correctly, that things are going well, that you're on the right track, which is brevity, and you could choose the other side and just say, well, I'm going to just blast through everything. I'm going to read quickly and speak quickly and take on projects and just kind of bang them out and get them out the door.
But then you're not really learning anything and you're not setting yourself up to do better the next time because you hadn't contemplated anything, right? So if you want to be able to move more quickly, which you should, because that means you're getting better, and that's the signal to expect.
But you also want to make sure you have a good technique that is something true about it, and that you can contemplate and think about things deeply, then what you should do as a simple heuristic for finding a better technique, or one in the first place, is ask yourself, how could you move more slowly doing this thing while getting it done sooner.
Because in that kind of paradoxical truth lies something structural, something that is commensurate with nature, something that goes along with how nature actually works. You can do a lot more with less. You can move much more quickly by moving a lot more slowly. Okay, so if all that is true, then we should employ the heuristic for finding good or better techniques. And just ask yourself how you could move more slowly while getting it done sooner. Okay, so find the slowness that moves you.
We know that moving slower means we can focus on what matters. We know that moving fast is a signal for figuring things out, and therefore, we should try to find the slowness that moves us. And even though it sounds paradoxical, we know that in any case of a paradox, you can only choose one. So choose the one that gives you an action that you can move slowly on, and then gives you the byproduct of brevity, which is a signal that you're on the right track.
And I think a really good heuristic to employ. When you're thinking about getting better at something, thinking about what technique you would want to employ, just ask yourself how you could move more slowly while getting it done sooner. Okay, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, take care. Take it.