Going Slow to Go Fast
I didn’t mean to focus so much on work-life balance these last few weeks, but my wife sent me this shareworthy article from the Wall Street Journal titled “How Women Can Ditch the Guilt When Juggling Careers and Family.”
The article includes a story about Jane Stevenson’s decision to take a year off from her executive job to develop deeper ties with her kids. But there was an interesting twist to that decision. From the article:
“Just before her sabbatical commenced, her employer insisted that she commit to generating $1 million of revenue while she was away.
“[...]Ms. Stevenson, a devout Seventh-Day Adventist, prayed for divine guidance before she signed the onerous agreement. ‘I just needed to do this [sabbatical]. It was like a calling,’ she recollected.
“During her sabbatical, she generated leads for more than $2 million of revenue—without placing a single business-development call. When corporate clients approached her about possible fresh search assignments, she directed them to relevant colleagues. ‘The work that I’d done all my life paid off,’ she noted.”
That’s amazing. Jane met her goals by not working!
That story reminded me of an anecdote Derek Sivers shared on the Tim Ferriss Show. Derek would ride his bike along the beach in Santa Monica—“just red faced huffing, but just pushing it as hard as I can”—and the route would always take him 43 minutes to complete. He shared this realization after getting frustrated by his lack of progress:
“So then I said, ‘You know that’s not cool for me to start to associate negative stuff with going on the bike ride. Why don’t I just chill for once. I’m just going to go on the same bike ride, but I’m not going to be a complete snail, but I’ll go at half of my normal pace.’
“So I got on my bike and it was just pleasant. I just went on the same bike ride, but I was standing up more and I just noticed that I was looking around more. I looked out into the ocean and I noticed that day there were these dolphins jumping in the ocean. […]Anyway, so the point is, I had such a nice time. It was just purely pleasant. There was no red face. There was no huffing and puffing. I was just cycling. It was nice. When I got back to my usual stopping place, I looked at my watch and it said 45 minutes and I was like, ‘No way. How the hell that could have been 45 minutes as compared to my usual 43? There’s no way.’ But yeah, it was right … 45 minutes.
“That was a profound lesson that I think changed the way I’ve approached my life ever since. It’s because I realize that I guess…93 point something percent of my huffing and puffing and all that red face and all that stress was only for an extra two minutes. It was basically for nothing.”
Both stories are great examples of how taking the decision to downshift from the top gear—and getting rid of the frantic and stress-inducing parts of our lives—can actually yield better performance.
John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach, captured this same concept in his manta: “be quick, but don’t hurry.” He expands on it in this video:
The key quote was this: “You make mistakes when you hurry. Be under control. I want quickness under control. Otherwise, you’ll have activity without achievement. I don’t care for activity without achievement.”
All that said, my experience is that the blocker to implementing a go slower strategy is that it requires revising the stories we tell ourselves about what it takes to be successful.
We need to change “I need to pull an all-nighter to get ready” to “I need to get a good night’s sleep to be ready.” We need to change “I need to complete a lot of projects to get noticed” to “I need to make sure we’re focused on the most impactful projects to get noticed.”
And some of us need to change our fear of imperfection into a realization that our “pretty good” is usually “pretty damn good.”
Until that happens, it’s hard to have faith that taking the edge off of our effort can boost performance. But hopefully, Jane, Derek, Navy SEALs, and Coach Wooden help us believe!
A QUOTE I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT
“You can get 95% of the results you want by calmly putting one foot in front of the other. One former Navy SEAL friend recently texted me a principle used in their training: ‘Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.’”
—Tim Ferriss, in Tools of Titans
(If you doubt that idea, try to tie your shoes as fast as possible!)