Daily Lab: The pace is the point.
To stay fast, slow down.
If you want to do something quickly, find a slower way.
You know those people in your life who are always in motion, but never seem to get anywhere?
Bouncing from project to project, task to task. Appointment to appointment. They’re always moving at top speed, choosing the fastest of all available options.
They’re always on the way somewhere, and never where they need to be.
It’s easy to spot this among people, but harder to spot in ourselves, as business owners.
But how often do we confuse motion for direction?
The lesson is the same for them and for us: Find a slower way.
Not so that you can do less, but so you can do anything at all.
And in marketing, there’s almost always a fast way and a slow way.
You can slowly create valuable, evergreen content and harvest new business opportunities for years at a pace you can sustain.
Or you can hit the pavement, send out cold emails, and get work fast, and hopefully not burn out.
You can throw endless money at advertising and buy every sale at an ever-increasing price, hoping to capture enough of the market to eke out a profit.
Or you can slowly and steadily build a business that doesn’t need to be big to do big things, and can grow from profit instead of trying to grow into it.
Business is a marathon, not a sprint—and according to the world’s fastest marathoner, Eliud Kipchoge, the key is not to make progress quickly.
As Brad Stulberg wrote in The Practice of Groundedness, Kipchoge’s success can be summed up by his mantra: “Slowly by slowly.”
The point isn’t to be slow, the point is to be as fast as you can, for as long as you can.
The pace is the point.
