Slow is Fake

Building a startup is fucking hard. 

The reason why it's hard is because you are always trying to make progress / grow. Growth is painful. 

One of the things I have really struggled with in my head is how do you become calm and urgent at the same time. So let’s dive in.

From one of the all time greats,

nat.org
https://nat.org/

So why urgency? Why not build things at an average pace? 

Urgency is when you are acting with very close time boxes that are often uncomfortable. Urgency also causes you to do something today, instead of tomorrow. This week instead of next week. 

This is quite different to the average pace.

So let's first explore what average pace is. 

Average pace is when you wake up and get yourself out of the bed and brush your teeth. It's when you make your coffee. That's the average pace. You don't do those things with excitement. You don't do those things to become better at something; or better than others. Average pace is what we are accustomed to. 

This is why when people come to work- they think working is supposed to be at a normal pace. 

This way isn't an exciting way to work or live. 

Take a sport. You don't go to practice to just get by. You go to practice to win. Get better than the next guy. 

That's the level of excitement that should come to your work. Work needs to be something you are doing for the joy of getting better.

It's very rare for one to fall in love with their profession like this. It's also very rare to find a workplace that believes in this and be surrounded by people who believe this. 

nat.org
https://twitter.com/sama/status/1345140364995227648

Isn’t urgency a gateway to anxiety? 

We make a mistake in thinking that urgency is when someone is running around in all directions without any plan. It's tiring and it feels overwhelming. It’s like you're spinning your wheels and stuck in mud. This would get you burned out.

I think this confusion happens because we believe the opposite of urgency is calmness. 

The opposite of calmness is anxiety. Anxiety is when you are not sure what exactly to do. It’s when there are 1000 moving pieces that you can’t figure out how they all fit in.

Urgent people aren't anxious - urgent people are excited. 

The opposite of urgency is slowness.

Slow is boring.

There is a big difference. 

twitter.com
https://twitter.com/sama/status/1331258019594842112

How to be calm? 

The first step to being calm is to get clarity. What most refer to as anxiety is actually a lack of clarity. 

When you don’t have an accurate grasp of reality - you lack the ability to identify what degree of clarity you have of your goals and plans. 

When you assign a measurement to the degree of clarity you have, you have a yardstick to measure. 

The best way to increase clarity is doing some actions that get you to move a few basis points up on the clarity scale.

This is when urgency comes into play. 

Urgency is when you want to get to the immediate next step. It's not to go all the way to 100 but rather going from 1 to 2. 2 to 3 on the clarity scale.

Now how to create urgency? 

There are several healthy and unhealthy ways of creating urgency. What do you mean unhealthy? Unhealthy is if the method used to create urgency increases anxiety. 

I'll list down a few healthy and unhealthy ones. I am not saying the unhealthy ones are bad. Mostly it should be used temporarily. Some amount of anxiety is necessary to take off the initial inertia that you’d have. 

Unhealthy 

  • Imagine somewhere else in the world there is a team similar to you who is working with more urgency than you do and spending most of their time working. A good example of this is Google AI Lab and Open AI. Google had all the resources, but Open AI focused more on getting a working product in the hands of people knowing fully well others were giants in the industry. 

  • Imagine there is a market switch that happens, and you are not prepared to capture it. An example of this is Meow, a crypto currency platform that pivoted to doing T-bills and, with SVBs collapse, amassed 500M in deposits. If they weren't ready, they wouldn't be able to capture this moment. 

    Disclaimer - I don’t know anyone from these companies, and they might not have done what I have mentioned.

Healthy

  • Show and tell - go and announce to the world how fast you are doing things and how much swiftly goes from imagination / figment of people's minds to tangible work that's having an impact in the world. Do demos of your work to your teammates. Do demos of your work to your cheerleaders. 
  • If you are picking a goal - do a mental exercise of adding a zero to the end of the goal and see what you can achieve for that.
  • Picture yourself in the future, where your personal heroes congratulate you for your work. 

Can you act thoughtfully / strategically when you act urgently? 

I think the key to acting thoughtfully in a long-term view is how much clarity you have of the problem and domain. I already established that urgency isn't anxiety.

Urgency helps you to speed up your path to get to clarity.

When you have more clarity - you make strategic decisions. You make decisions that are thoughtful. 

Another bonus point - when you are urgent, rarely will you have sunk cost fallacy.

How to make decisions urgently?

Decision-making requires a framework of identifying what decisions are reversible easily. If something is reversible, take the decision swiftly. 

Also, get more clarity on the problem. This will help you convert one-way door decisions into more revolving door decisions by slightly changing the matter at hand.

Anything not reversible - put yourself in a mandatory time box. 

How do you prevent burnout? 

The next elephant in the room is burnout.

Let's first identify what burnout is. 

Burnout is not - being tired.

Burnout is identified by exhaustion. 

This is crucial. Imagine you are an athlete - you go to the gym and come home. You don't feel sore. That means you probably didn't work out. 

The same applies to work. You need to feel tired at the end of the work day. You should feel that sense of accomplishment coming out of the gym. 

The key here is to identify what's good pain and bad pain. 

Good pain is knowing that progress is being made. 

Bad pain is when you don't see an end in sight and your enthusiasm is dampening. It's like when you finish some work off - you'd feel like aha, I have more things to do.

You never do this after a workout. You'd be excited to come back to the gym again. 

For you to execute at a high urgency pace - the most crucial thing is rest. 

When I say rest - I am speaking about a particular kind of rest. 

You spend time being in the present moment. 

The present moment is when you are utterly at the same place from mind / body and spirit. It's almost a meditation practice that allows you to be connected with the present state of being. 

This is absolutely crucial. When you are acting with urgency - you lose track of the present moment. 

This causes a different type of exhaustion where you can't be excited about the future anymore. It's almost as if your brain is overdosed on dopamine. 

Important vs. Urgent

The other misconception people have is about categorizing things into what's urgent and what's important. 

This is a false dichotomy. If your motivation is to make progress - important and urgent become the same thing. Or rather, you need to start asking the question - what's the right thing to do? 

When you start to ask that question, you start to realize that right is defined by what speed we can make progress.

Teamwork and Urgency

When working as a team, there are a few things to keep watch out for. First is the shared goal. This could be a company goal. Then, this goal can be broken into smaller goals that fit into smaller pods.

Pods are a great way to have accountability. Also, pods have the added advantage of 1 member belonging to more than 1 pod. 

When starting out - you can have 1 pod, and everyone moves to achieve the goals of the pod. I am assuming every member of the pod is with high agency.

There are two important roles in the pod - The first is someone who gets clarity to the team. I call this person the curator. 

The curator’s goal is to increase clarity by constantly showing everyone how all their efforts together fit into the puzzle. Curators can list related tasks together, making it easy to see the definition of done. When you do knowledge work - it's easy to get lost in your own world and miss this. The Curator's other role is to make sure that no member is blocked.

The next role is - the Instigator. The Instigator can pick up the hardest task and complete it at incredible speed and show how fast the 10-minute mile can be run. 

This put more coal in the fire. 

The next thing the instigator can do is to batch a set of small tasks that are unrelated and do it at incredible speed giving the team a sense of relief that a lot of work got done. 

It's important that these two roles are held by individual contributors. It's very hard for individuals in the pod to empathize with anyone who is not actively contributing, and this causes many conflicts (this is why ivory tower architects and PMs fail)