Congratulations, Speedy! Here’s Your Next Assignment

For my parents’ generation, the 1990s and early 2000s came with a big learning curve. It said, “Keep up!” The rise of the personal computer and, subsequently, the internet meant these folks needed to adapt by going faster. We all did. 

Well, we did it. Congratulations! We’ve changed our brains to operate 24/7/365. We get things done at hyperspeed. Projects that would takes weeks and months and many plane flights and rental cars are somehow done faster, better, and more often on Slack and a few Zoom calls. 

We’ve mastered hyperproduction. 

Our next challenge is remembering the old way. Now every kind of adaptation,result, and desire can be reconciled with speed. Call me a romantic, but maybe most of the best kinds of outcomes in life are only possible through time under tension. There’s a slowness that is still important and if you cannot fix your attention on a longer horizon and focus for years on something, you’re likely suffering from that fact. 

TikTok-level attention spans work in a TikTok world, but our world isn’t only about speed. Relationships, skill-based mastery, and projects with deep roots cannot happen at the speed of 5G. 

Buckle up for the slow ride, folks.