The Counterintuitive Path to Going Fast

For those people who have met me in my youth and early career, they probably remember me as an eager-beaver who worked really fast, which enabled me more time to move on to new projects. The badge of honor I got for that was that I was able to produce a lot in a short amount of time. It was something I took pride in: working fast.

As I started to mature in my career, I realized that after I had completed a task (quickly), I might ruminate on it overnight or over a few days and realized that I wanted to refine it and make it better, more robust. At times, I regretted submitting my work so quickly, and would ask my supervisor if they have read my submission yet...if not, to delete it because I wanted to send in something new. This happened several times, and I thus I began my journey of not hitting "send" so quickly. This sometimes pained me, because I very much enjoyed seeing the pleasant surprise from my supervisor when I turned around something within a shorter time frame than they had expected. However, at times, I realized that even though I completed my project quickly, it sat in their inboxes unread for days. So the speed was completely unnecessary. In time, I started to allow myself to complete my project, then "sleep on it" overnight or even a few days. There has never been a time that I didn't realize that I could have done something more or better with it. And I was glad to have given it more time for thought and improvement.

"It's better to go slow in the right direction than to go fast in the wrong direction." 

-- Simon Sinek

Today, unless it's absolutely necessary, I almost never provide anyone anything in short order if I can at all help it. I like to build in the time for greater reflection and thought. In many ways, the reason for this natural "slow down" is that my projects have gotten rather difficult and complex over time. Coming up with a new pricing model or go-to-market strategy is not something to be whipped up same-day and implemented immediately. In startups, due to financial pressures depending on the length of the runway, there's often a great sense of urgency. The fast pace of life in startups invigorates me and I naturally gravitate towards it. However, after co-founding a startup and sold it 15 years after, participating in a few more startups, and advising several more, I have learned that taking the time needed to adequately prepare and premeditate the consequences (just like a chess game) can end up saving a lot of valuable time and resources. 

The counterintuitive path to going fast is in fact to go slow. Otherwise, there often ends up being a lot of backtracking and frustrating re-work, or hours spent putting together off-base proposals without asking all the right questions up front. All of which are in fact demoralizing time-wasters. And one of the consequence of this is that employees feel that the senior management team "doesn't know what they're doing" and may start to lose confidence in the team. While one can never know all of the answers or guarantee positive outcomes at all times, confidence in you doesn't erode too rapidly when people see that adequate thoughtfulness was put into the process.

Simon Sinek's quote that "it's better to go slow in the right direction than to go fast in the wrong direction" is 100% on point. For some folks like me, it's an uncomfortable practice at first. Whenever I do a post-mortem of "what went wrong" or "what could we have done to do something better", the inevitable conclusion often points to us rushing forward and putting the cart before the horse.  

For those co-workers of mine who had to wait for me to come up with ideas or talking points to extricate out of a thorny problem or to ideate creative points of differentiation in the marketplace or new pricing or revenue models, I am thankful for their patience. While I sometimes feel inclined to apologize in advance for insisting that we take the time to do a plethora of research and contingency planning just for one meeting, I realize that I've really nothing to apologize for. Sometimes, you only get one shot, and you've got to make it count.