Going fast is different from rushing

Speed is built.

We're tempted to skimp on the building part. When something is slow, we want it to go faster; rush! hurry up! now!

Be it making money or getting promoted, getting new customers or shipping our new product, slimming down or getting stronger, being well read or being, well, read – it's something we desire, and we want it very badly, and we need it yesterday.

And so we push harder.

But speed is not about effort in the rushing part.

Yes, there's a lot of effort needed in going fast; way more than we can do by pushing our hardest and rushing right now.

And it all goes on the building part.

Building up speed on the guitar and the pavement

Playing music and running are great metaphors for going fast versus rushing in life. Like all great metaphors, they are illustrative and imperfect.

Sometimes on the guitar, I will try to play a song I haven't practiced in a while, such as Dream Theater's Erotomania. It's a great song, with melodic and fast passages.

Honestly, it sounds like a hack job. Notes come out unclear, my string attacks are picked a little too early or too late, the sound is uneven; every play-through is dysfunctional in its own way.

I'm not fast. I'm rushing.

Talking about going fast, I started running last year. I'd go to the nearby lake and try to run around it 4 times.

At first, I'd finish the run exhausted, even though I wasn't running that fast. All my times were over 30 minutes for a distance of a little over 5 kilometers – quite slow.

Over the past year, I've built a lot of speed through running and exercising.

My time for 4 laps on the lake now is 23:43. Although a novice, I'm much faster now.

I'm fast. I'm not rushing.

Going fast is easy, building speed is hard

There's a Japanese saying: "Laugh on the dojo, cry on the battlefield. Cry on the dojo, laugh on the battlefield."

In JiuJitsu, as in many other martial arts, you have black belts and white belts. In chess, you have grandmasters and novices, and so on.

When a black belt faces a white belt in practice, the white belt will give their all, and the black belt will only put a minimal effort to match it.

The black belt and white belt are at distinct competence levels; what's challenging for one is easy for the other.

A white belt can't instantly reach a black belt competence level. No amount of effort in the moment gets even close to the effort spent across several years for the black belt.

Similarly, while rushing is about what you're doing now, being fast is about what you've done over the past several years.

Being fast is a function of our level, and our level is a function of how effectively we've focused on building it.

Being fast means being consistently fast

Naval Ravikant, in his Almanack, is quoted about his high confidence in quickly becoming wealthy again if he lost all of his money.

He also draws a good parallel between the importance of building skills versus just working hard.

Understand How Wealth Is Created

I like to think that if I lost all my money and you dropped me on a random street in any English-speaking country, within five or ten years I’d be wealthy again because it’s just a skillset I’ve developed that anyone can develop.

It’s not really about hard work. You can work in a restaurant eighty hours a week, and you’re not going to get rich. Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it. It is much more about understanding than purely hard work. Yes, hard work matters, and you can’t skimp on it. But it has to be directed in the right way.

If you don’t know yet what you should work on, the most important thing is to figure it out. You should not grind at a lot of hard work until you figure out what you should be working on.

Jorgenson, Eric. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness (p. 30). Magrathea Publishing. Kindle Edition.

And here's Michael Port talking about improving your Sales and Marketing in his best-seller Book Yourself Solid, focused on building competence to perform at a high level.

I like his use of the term "system" about what gets built:

I immediately began to engineer a completely replicable system that I could pass on to you. That system is the Book Yourself Solid system, and you're holding it in your hands, the same system that more than a million people have used since 2003.

It is realistic for you to become a successful self-employed professional. But, you need to learn the skills necessary to promote your work and become the go-to person in your field [..]

Port, Michael. Book Yourself Solid . Wiley. Kindle Edition.

The theme is similar: hard work is crucial, but it's spent on building competence and doing the right work.

Ask yourself: "What competence am I missing?"

The lack of speed that compels us to rush is a manifestation of gaps in our competence.

So next time you're inclined to rush, to bridge that difference in the speed between where you wish you were and where you are, ask yourself:

"What competence am I missing that caused this gap in speed to manifest in the first place?"

That's a much harder question to answer. Filling that competence gap will require way more effort than just rushing, and it will take much longer too.

But while rushing hides our weaknesses, asking ourselves where our competence gaps lie creates the back pressure necessary and the opportunities we need to address them.

This way, we go fast not by rushing, but by elevating ourselves to a higher level of competence.