Over the New Year holiday, Fast Company celebrated the coming of its 20th year in business. I still find this magazine cutting edge, blending together a review of business, culture and technology issues and events to produce an overview of the zeitgeist of our time. As someone who has attempted to be a scholar of culture, both understanding historical times and how the patterns of that history informs our today, I find Fast Company an inspiring read.
For the anniversary issue, Editor Robert Safian penned “Twenty predictions for the next 20 years.” The magazine has trod down this road before, and I usually find their thoughts useful. His #1 thought is, to some degree, a no-brainer. He predicts “Speed Will Triumph.” This is something the magazine has been defending for a few years now; their issue of top innovative companies in 2013 drew a similar list of key factors for success in the 21st century. Speed again was a key factor.
This factor is all around us whether when you consider how fast technology companies produce new products and software updates. It often feels impossible to know a software well before it changes, often in sweeping ways. Today, most companies operate in a “perpetual beta” where the product is never truly considered finished. Or, it’s finished state is one that previously would have been rejected as incomplete or lacking enough polish. This is similar the Internet concept of “Good Enough” where, as this article from Wired in 2009 states “We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect.”
As you consider your own next best steps, whether in school or in the business world, you must keep speed in mind. If someone else can do it nearly as well as you and do it faster, they will win, especially in business. Speed has taken over.
And yet….
At the same time I am writing this, I just completed reading The Inklings about C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. Written in 1978 just five years after Tolkien’s death, the book is a startling look at the difference of life in the 1920s-1940s in England. The main thing that grabbed my attention was how slow paced their life was. I’ve told a few friends that as I read the book, I was convinced that they must have had 36 hour days. Again and again I read about 2 hour lunches at the local pub and 4 hour walks in the afternoon. And of course there was the main point of the name of the book, their club that met every Thursday night for 3-4 hours, often going past midnight. I wondered, as a fellow professor, when they ever took time to grade papers or prepare class discussions.
In other words, their life was one of pace. Not as the word is used in some sports, like soccer, where one will say that player has “good pace.” No, I mean in the concept of “pacing oneself.” They understood that life was not some race to accomplish a thousand things in 24 hours. They were certainly NOT focused on being first. Tolkien in particular, as an author, seemed quite unconcerned with whether his Lord of the Rings book would ever get to print.
I think a good argument can be made that we are ill-served with our devotion to speed. I think science is already hinting that we are not well, as we hurtle from one thing to another, mad-capped, rarely even noticing what is going on around us.
So, as you consider your own next best steps, whether in school or in the business world, you must keep pace in mind. What could be the very thing that helps you stand out is your comfort with a slower pace, with an attention to detail rarely seen. In particular, in your relationships, choose pace over speed…the willingness to invest time just as those men from England did. You’ll be glad you did.