The cost of urgency

I’m building a new business, and I’m finding it hard to shake the feeling that I need to be moving faster.

In the past, when I’ve created a new offering, it was often accompanied by the desire for a quick return on investment. I wanted to launch a thing because I needed some money coming in.

But now, despite COVID, things are more stable. I’m creating something new because I want to, not because I’m desperate and digging myself out of a hole. And that means I can take my time. However, I still feel that underlying sense of urgency. And this urgency carries a cost.

It’s not hard to figure out where the urgency is coming from. It is the ghost of my past experiences, mentors, and books and articles I’ve read. From these sources, I’ve absorbed the story that, with every day that I’m not launching my new thing, I’m leaving money on the table. I’m letting my future customers down. I’m stalling and hiding, not living up to my potential.

But if I listen to this story and follow its implicit directive — move fast, focus, launch, build, now — I run the risk of creating something that isn’t what I want.

I want adventure and excitement in my life and work, sure. But I also want a sense of ease and an abiding serenity. And I want to help my clients to feel that same ease and serenity, too. Pushing myself to go faster all the time is incompatible with that.

Deadlines are important. They help us to get things done. But deadlines don’t have to be set up so as to force us to sleep under our desks or commit other pseudo-heroic acts in the name of work. Project timelines can be humane and manageable, directing our focus without turning our lives upside down.

Whenever I have had to push myself hard to meet a deadline, it has taken some time to recover. That sense of trying to outrun some predator, the legacy of many thousands of years of urgency baked into our neurochemistry, takes awhile to fade. It can be satisfying to bask in the afterglow of a job well done, but I don’t want to experience that intensity on a constant basis. Cortisol is for special occasions only.

When we’re paying attention to the prevailing rhetoric — push harder, go faster, do more, be more, make your dreams come true now or it will be too late — we can get sucked into a perpetual state of urgency. This taxes our adrenal system, ruins our sleep and diet, and makes it impossible for us to relax. There is always more work we should be doing, and no end to the work we could be doing. There is no enjoyment of where we are because we’re always looking ahead.

Yes, this urgency is how empires, be they political or commercial, get built, but this is also the way that individuals, families, communities, and societies fall apart. We owe it to ourselves to decide which of our projects are truly urgent, and to allow the rest to proceed at a more measured pace.

Slowing down is hard. Change is hard. If you’re used to pushing and forcing, then allowing and exploring are unfamiliar modes of being. I have to consciously, deliberately play with my thoughts in order to stay in this space, and even then I am still swayed by external voices that tempt me to leap forward. But looking back over the past couple of years, I’m grateful for a number of leaps that I did not make. I know that I’m on the right track.

Slow and steady wins the race, but does it have to even be a race? Maybe the hare’s way — sprint and then nap — works just as well as the tortoise’s in the long run. We might even find that we’re happy right where we are. There’s no right or wrong way to do a life or a business. We don’t have to be in a hurry, and we don’t have to follow someone else’s plan for us. We can go at our own pace and do it our own way.