Fast. Faster. Fastest. We live in a world where speed is valued highly. If you’re not going fast enough, how can you stay in the race?
I’m all for speed; in fact, if you don’t pay attention to it, you can be left behind in a heartbeat. I also know that you need to manage speed, because if you whiz along constantly at high speed without taking a breath, someone else or something else will slow you down.
Here’s a secret to managing speed: Take action (at top speed, if you wish), reflect on what you did, and then engage in more action. This may seem counterintuitive, but give it a try.
The act of reflecting changes your pace, because it gives you time to consider and evaluate what you were doing. It’s like hitting the pause button, but it’s actually more robust because you’re taking time to consider and evaluate your previous activity.
Another way to manage speed is to take a dramatic break from what you’re doing by doing something entirely different, and then return to the original activity. It will look and feel different to you because the new sensory input “shook up” the first activity.
The important point is that in order to sustain speed, at some point you need to mix up the pace. And, you may not always be able to take a dramatic break, but you can always take time to reflect.
So while you’re rocketing away in your work, your life, your ambitions, manage your speed and you’ll find that you get even more done than you expected.
“The summer night is like a perfection of thought.”
– Wallace Stevens
Header image by Vlad Chetan/Pexels.com.
