Paradox of Speed

Throughout my career, I’ve been known for efficiency. Everyone views me as the person who can get the most done in the least amount of time. I’ve long worn this identity as a badge of honor. One of the best parts of being identified this way is the reality you strengthen around it. But one of the worst parts of being identified this way is how it grows to define you, whether you want it to or not.

And one could argue we’re in the most profitable time for these skills. AI tooling has exploded and AI agents are on the rise. We’re rapidly witnessing AI automate repetitive tasks and more efficiently complete work typically done by humans. I should be giddy with excitement, right? I am in some ways, but I’m also thinking about it differently.

If AI is going to take care of the repetitive tasks on the surface, I have time and space to go deeper, indulge critical thinking, and spend time in the creative mess of exploration. Whether that reality exists today—or ever will—is up for debate, but it’s the future I’m hoping for.

There’s this idea called the Paradox of Speed. It’s centered around the idea of slowing down in order to speed up. But how can you move faster when you start by moving slower? Therein lies the paradox! And this concept is something I’ve been really interested in recently.

What can history teach us here? Unsurprisingly, there are many stories where the Paradox of Speed is on display. Let’s walk through those stories and explore how this concept can be more deeply engrained in our work, especially in the age of rapid innovation we’re in.

John D. Rockefeller’s Garden Breaks

Let’s begin with John D. Rockefeller. He was a well-known businessman, magistrate, and philanthropist who lived from July 8, 1839, to May 23, 1937. He is widely regarded as one of the wealthiest Americans in history, and is considered the richest person in modern history. He achieved a range of accomplishments in his illustrious career: from pioneering the concept of a corporate trust to donating more than $500 million to various causes, focusing on education, medicine, and scientific research.

It’s easy to imagine how his days must have filled up. There surely was no shortage of work to do or matters to tend to. But one of the most interesting things I learned about his life is the work he did in his garden. Rockefeller had a passion for gardening and landscaping, and he used these activities as both a form of relaxation and a way to escape the noise and give his mind time off.

The garden is where he would intentionally slow down and reflect. He would engage in an activity he enjoyed, while giving his mind intentional space to relax. Whether he knew it or not, he was enabling a biological trigger rooted in science. It’s call the Default Mode Network of the brain, or DMN. Let’s turn there next to see how we can take advantage of it in our own work.

Default Mode Network (DMN)

The Default Mode Network (DMN) is a large-scale brain network that becomes active when the mind is at rest and not focused on external tasks. It plays a central role in self-referential thinking, memory, and social cognition. We don’t know for sure, but this part of the brain most likely evolved to support introspection and social awareness, aiding survival by enabling self-preservation and anticipating the actions of others—useful skills in tribal communities.

The DMN is most engaged during passive rest, much like the Garden Breaks Rockefeller enjoyed. The more he spent time in the garden, the more his mind would wander as it carried out tasks that required minimal conscious effort. That’s the key. We don’t want something complex and novel that requires our brain’s full attention. We need to engage in an activity that keeps our mind occupied, yet not fully—like gardening, walking, or even showering. This is the same reason “shower thoughts” are a thing. We’re doing something without much conscious effort, giving our mind space to wander freely and engage the DMN.

There’s a lesson here we can bring into our work. As knowledge workers participating in deeply cognitive work, we can find our own Garden Breaks—the space to wander in an unstructured environment while our brain processes information. This is where connections are made, and it’s critical to create this space when doing creative and demanding work. But now let’s turn towards the lessons inherent to the Paradox of Speed as it relates to making slow decisions.

The Mountaineer’s Pause

Joe Simpson is a renowned British mountaineer. In 1985, he gained fame during a harrowing climb while descending Siula Grande, a 6,344-meter peak in the Peruvian Andes. While making the climb with his climbing partner, Simon Yates, Simpson broke his leg after a fall. Yates attempted to lower him down the mountain using a rope system, but ended up having to cut the rope in order to save his own life. Presumed dead after falling into a crevasse, Simpson somehow miraculously crawled back to base camp over the course of three days.

In 2008, Simpson was leading a group of climbers up a treacherous route in the Swiss Alps. As they approached a particularly challenging section, the weather began to rapidly deteriorate, which forced Simpson to reassess the situation before moving forward. The group was eager to push on with the climb, but Simpson’s experience forced him to slow down. After sitting quietly for 30 minutes and observing the conditions, Simpson made the decision to halt the climb and turn back. The group was disappointed, but Simpson’s decision was validated when a severe blizzard hit the mountain, just two hours after they began their descent down the mountain. Had they carried forward, they would have been caught in life-threatening conditions.

Now, a lot of decisions aren’t immediately validated like this one. And sometimes we don’t ever receive the benefit of validation. But slowing down and deliberately thinking about the right path forward potentially saved the lives of Simpson’s climbers. This is an exercise in understanding slow thinking—or as Daniel Kahneman calls it in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow—System 2 Thinking, which is slow, deliberate, and analytical.

System 2 Thinking

Not every decision requires this level of deliberate thinking. When I’m deciding what flavor green tea I want in the morning, I don’t need to be slow, deliberate, or analytical. This is a low-stakes decision I can make quickly. However, there are a lot of decisions and places where a higher level of deliberation is necessary. But how do we make that decision, to know when a decision warrants this kind of deliberation?

Here are the three questions I like to ask myself:

1. How consequential is the decision? One of my favorite ways to frame the consequence of a decision: When making a decision, consider how you’ll feel about it in 5 minutes, 5 months, and 5 years. When it matters in 5 years, that’s when it deserves a slower pace.
2. Can the decision be reversed? Once this decision is made, can I change it? When the decision is not (easily) reversible and consequential, it’s worth slowing down.
3. What’s the cost of inaction? There are always hidden costs when we spend time on anything. It’s not just the time spent on the one thing—it’s the time not spent on something else. When there is a lower opportunity cost to the decision, slowing down is important.

The next two stories will affirm this idea more concretely because they are examples where high-stake decisions required slowing down. And, as you’ll see, sometimes slowing down is just a delay of mere minutes. It’s not about taking days, weeks, or months to decide. It’s about being intentional when making decisions, especially consequential and irreversible ones.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union from October 16 to October 28, 1962. This crisis was part of the larger Cold War, and it’s considered the closest event to escalating to full-scale nuclear war. In short, the stakes were about as high as they could get. This situation not only checks the box of being consequential, but also of being irreversible. So how did the main players like President John F. Kennedy engage in the same System 2 Thinking as Simpson?

JFK and his advisors were under immense pressure to quickly resolve the situation. The result of a delayed response could mean catastrophic and world-ending consequences. But instead of rushing into military action, Kennedy chose careful deliberation, to engage in the System 2 Thinking we saw Simpson use earlier.

He convened the Executive Committee (ExComm) to carefully evaluate multiple options, including military airstrikes, invasion, or a naval blockade. This was a process that required gathering a lot of information and weighing the consequences of each action. Groupthink was also another problem that plagued Kennedy in earlier decisions during the Bay of Pigs. In order to avoid it this time around, that meant engaging with diverse perspectives to encourage dissent and debate. Again, this process requires slower, more deliberate, and more analytical thinking.

The results of the intentional decision-making process is the peaceful resolution of the crisis, avoiding the full-scale nuclear war everyone feared. Slow and steady won the race even amidst a tense and fast-moving situation.

Stanislav Petrov’s Decision

Just over twenty years later, we see a similar process used to avoid a similar outcome with the decision made by Stanislav Petrov, lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces. While on duty, Petrov was monitoring the Soviet early-warning system, which reported that five U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) had been launched toward the Soviet Union. Standard protocol dictated that Petrov notify the higher ups in the chain of command. The problem, however, is this could have resulted in a nuclear retaliatory response.

Engaging his System 2 Thinking, Petrov made a different call. He noticed multiple factors that made him question the system’s warning. Firstly, the attack pattern was unusual. If the U.S. were to send in a first air strike, it would include hundreds of missiles, not five. Secondly, the Oko early-warning system was new and largely untested. Thirdly, and maybe most critically, the ground-based radar systems did not confirm the missile launches. This is a beautiful string of deductive reasoning only possible with deliberation and analytical thinking.

Petrov, trusting this reasoning and his own instinct, classified the alerts as false alarms and chose not to escalate the situation. So what happened? Well, his judgements were later proven correct when they discovered the false alarms were caused by a rare alignment of sunlight reflecting off high-altitude clouds, which confused the satellite system. Another win for slowing down.

There’s also another sliver of beautiful insight hidden in this story: Slowing down gave Petrov the chance to engage his intuition. When we’re always rushing forward flying the banner of speed and efficiency, we don’t get a chance to use one of our most effective biological tools: our gut. And the best way to improve your intuition is through making and understanding decisions, just like Petrov and Simpson. You only get that chance when you use speed deliberately.

Alexander Fleming

The last example from history teaches us that slowing down forces us to pay attention. We become mindful, curious observers to the world around us, which can ignite world-altering discoveries, much like the groundbreaking discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1928.

I love this story because it’s also a beautiful example of how slowing down stokes the fire of curiosity. We give our minds a chance to explore, to play, to question the world around us. That fire can blaze a trail that changes the course of history, just like it did here. If we’re always moving as fast as we can in the name of efficiency, we might miss these chances.

Okay, so what happened? After coming back from vacation, Fleming noticed that one of his petri dishes containing Staphylococcus bacteria had been contaminated with a fungus. For most scientists, this would have meant contamination and immediately trashing the sample. Fleming, curiosity piqued, took the sample and examined it further—he slowed down. Upon further examination, he noticed something interesting: the bacterial colonies surrounding the fungus were destroyed, but those further away remained intact. After further testing, he discovered and named the antibacterial substance “penicillin” in 1929. This discovery marked the beginning of the antibiotic era, which has saved countless lives and transformed modern medicine.

The Benefits of Slowing Down

When we don’t intentionally slow down and evaluate our options before making a decision, we miss chances for serendipitous discoveries. Like Alexander Fleming and the discovery of penicillin, it was only made through careful observation dictated by a slower pace. It gave him the space necessary to find the signal in the noise. When we don’t slow down, we endlessly consume information without unlocking insights. When Stanislav Petrov made his decision, he did so by consciously slowing down and diligently sifting through the information. He was able to take all the information and unlock key insights that led to the avoidance of catastrophe. And when we don’t slow down, we make short-sighted decisions with far-reaching consequences. Imagine what kind of world we’d live in if the Cuban Missile Crisis went a different way; or what fate may have become the hiking group had Joe Simpson not slowed down; or the quality and impact of John D. Rockefeller’s decisions without his Garden Breaks.

Within each story, the thread is the same: When we slow down and mindfully deliberate on the path forward, we give ourselves the best chance of success. We cultivate the conditions required to do our best work, knowing when to slow down and when to speed up. This paradox is a balance, a tension that acts as a compass to generate progress. Speed, like all attributes, is but a tool to wield. And with all tools, the knowledge is in knowing how it works, and the wisdom is knowing when to use it.