NEED for Speed
If I evoked a memory in your mind, then you are really showing your age. Wow.
Anyway, I digress.
You’re not moving fast enough.
You need to move faster.
I’ve said some variation of those phrases to my baby brother, friends, anybody that has made the mistake of letting me bend their ear in the last few weeks. I’ll be honest that, in my quiet moments at the end of the day assessing what I’ve shipped, I say it to myself too.
But why am I saying this? What is the urgency?
I hesitate to answer because it’s a visceral feeling that I’m struggling to articulate. It’s not coming from any belief this way or that about the dawn of AGI or what will happen to people’s livelihoods. None of that. While over the last decade or so, I’ve made it a habit to dance at the cutting edge, I try really hard to make sure that I keep my clear wits about me amid hype. So this isn’t driven by hype
However, there are a few clear things. Generational shifts are happening. The pace at which things will change (we don’t know in what ways) will be very overwhelming for most people. My thesis is that if you already get yourself moving at a fast clip, things changing around you won’t affect you as much. Granted, it’s likely to be a Red Queen situation where it feels like if you ever stop running, you die.
What does it mean to move fast?
Here we’ll be applying something I picked up from Alex Hormozi that I’m calling Skills Deconstruction and it’s basically the idea that when you are given an arbitrary task (e.g. be more charismatic, be intelligent) there are component skills that when learned, aggregate into that arbitrary trait. And in trying to do so, we can look at the things that the people who exemplify those traits do, and just emulate them and we become that arbitrary task. So with charisma for instance, we look at the things charismatic people consistently do (A few of them are, but not limited to: Smile when people walk in or enter the room. Stand up straight with chest up and announce yourself upon entering a room. Make eye contact with everyone and while people talk). If you start doing them today, it won’t be very long before you’re described in the same way.
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I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds. So I digress. In our case, telling you to move faster is likely to only cause you to be anxious unless we break it into component tasks. And I’ll outline them below:
- Decide faster than you think — People who move fast decide on things quickly. Am I doing this or am I not. This is what some people call bias for action. Think of that person in your life that seems like they have 25 hours a day. This weekend, they tell you that they are thinking of starting an Alpaca farm. By mid-week, you can seen in their Instagram stories that they are on a farm somewhere in Southern Peru. With this, we borrow our leaf from Bezos. Let’s hear the man in his own words: “If you’re good at course correcting, being slow often means being safe… If you’re good at making new decisions quickly, you will beat someone who makes the right decision slowly.”
- Think ultra-fast, or don’t deep it — While it could easily be lumped up with the point above, it is separate, and it is for my fellow overthinkers. You have this solid idea. And then because you grew up on if you fail to plan, you plan to fail, you plan, and plan till you become Dr. Strange and you’ve evaluated. The only problem is that you’re not a member of the Avengers, and now it’s 3 years later and you still have this idea. I describe it so well, because I am the global president general of all Overthinkers (Nothing disabused me of being an overthinker than being in Crypto, but conversation for another day).
- Shorten the time it takes to get real life feedback — Ok so you have put aside your thinking cap, and now you’re making decisions faster. Now it is time to build. And so you spend your weekends building this thing, for 6 months. It’s ready now. But no one seems to care, no one wants to buy it. Now you’ve burned 6 months of your life, learning something you could have learnt within one week. Good job, Jacob.
- Ruthlessly prioritize — Have you ever tried reversing out of a tight spot with Gongo Aso playing on the car stereo at FULL BLAST. No? Why not? One of the very interesting things that you’re going to pick up very quickly when you start to move faster, is that you can only hold one thing in your mind (and actually be moving forward).
- Either execute on your ideas or throw them in the bin — Your ideas are not your children. Throw them away. Oh by the way, they are also not very unique either. And no, that person that launched it didn’t steal your idea.
- Compress time — Plan out how much time it is going to take for any task you are working on (yeah fine, plan just a little bit). Look at that time, say a year. Add a little bit of buffer. Say 3 months. 18 months, yeah? Now divide it by 10. Go. I am sure you felt a strike to your heart. How is that going to even be possible? But Elon (whether we communally like him or not) did exactly that. He got a 100k GPU cluster from receiving the hardware to training models in 19 days. You could say, fine he’s a billionaire, of course he can move fast like that. The industry standard is 1 year, after planning for 3 years. And the honest truth is: if you shift your mind into a mode where this is possible, for no reason at all, you will actually see that things actually don’t take as long.
- Actually move — Taking courses is not moving. Start first. You can take the course when you have launched, have paying customers and at your 1 year anniversary (I promise, nobody is going to notice that you are learning on the job, and making things up as you go, because they are doing it too). Planning is not moving. Having meetings with people in the space doing stuff adjacent, is not moving. Selling your product is moving. Getting a paid sample sent from your supplier is moving. Meetings with paying customers is moving.
I’ll be honest: it’s hard. I say it because I know firsthand what it’s like trying to apply these principles consistently. And I fall off. Hard. A lot.
There’s something that gets overlooked often when these things are shared. It’s that there’s a hesitation/fear (and rightly so, I might add) that going all in with either one of these, has a drawback that is punishable with failure. Ex: If you ruthlessly prioritize, you give up on your other dreams/ideas. Or if you do things without think deeply about them, you will make mistakes.
All of these concerns are stuff that I’ve thought through over time. And I came to the realization recently that usually, when these axioms are shared, they are shared in isolation. But not as a system, as I have shared above. Nobody tells you that when you turn off your brain from overthinking, you need to move quickly and test things out in the real world sooner rather than later, because that way you can quickly know what works and what doesn’t and move on to your next idea. It is important to apply them in tandem because each one protects you from the shortfalls of the others. And in doing so, you get all the benefits of what your life looks like when you move faster, but learning that while valid, your fears at the time were irrational.
I will end this piece, with something from the new sountrack of your life, Rema’s MARCH AM:
Raze am.
