Overall Thoughts

This books to remind you that speed and hard work should not come at the expense of quality work or a quality life. There’s an urge to always move faster as speed becomes a signal, rather than producing meaningful work. The solution is not always to work faster. Sometimes it’s to stop and reassess what you are doing. And often do nothing at all. But that sounds crazy to most type-A, hard-charging workers. Those who deliver exceptional value and unique insights are focused on creativity and quality, not showing up and putting in more and more hours. The smartest and most creative people know when to let their mind wander and when to work hard. This phenomenon is not just limited to a few individuals, but is a worldwide problem. This constant need for speed and efficiency is not always the best policy leading to stress and superficial relationships. The idea of "fast" and "slow" is not just about a rate of change but also a philosophy of life.

The Big Ideas

• Time-Sickness: The cult of speed

• Resist the urge to always move faster

• Living life fast vs. slow

• Being busy has become virtue signaling – look how important I am

• There’s a time to work hard and a time to relax

Time Sickness

In 1982 Larry Dossey, an American physician, coined the term “time-sickness” to describe the obsessive belief that “time is getting away, that there isn’t enough of it, and that you must pedal faster and faster to keep up.” These days, the whole world is time-sick. We all belong to the same cult of speed

Speed is not always the best policy. Evolution works on the principle of survival of the fittest, not the fastest.

Not Everything Needs to Be Done Faster

Even when speed starts to backfire, we invoke the go-faster gospel. Falling behind at work? Get a quicker Internet connection. No time for that novel you got at Christmas? Learn to speed-read. Diet not working? Try liposuction. Too busy to cook? Buy a microwave. And yet some things cannot, should not, be sped up. They take time; they need slowness. When you accelerate things that should not be accelerated, when you forget how to slow down, there is a price to pay.

The Desire For Speed is Often Anxiety and Stress Manifesting Itself

Fast and Slow do more than just describe a rate of change. They are shorthand for ways of being, or philosophies of life. Fast is busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity-over-quality. Slow is the opposite: calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity. It is about making real and meaningful connections—with people, culture, work, food, everything. The paradox is that Slow does not always mean slow. As we shall see, performing a task in a Slow manner often yields faster results.

Busyness is a Status Symbol

When people moan, “Oh, I’m so busy, I’m run off my feet, my life is a blur, I haven’t got time for anything,” what they often mean is, “Look at me: I am hugely important, exciting and energetic.”

Reaction, rather than reflection, is the order of the day. To make the most of our time, and to avoid boredom, we fill up every spare moment with mental stimulation. When did you last sit in a chair, close your eyes and just relax?...Instead of thinking deeply, or letting an idea simmer in the back of the mind, our instinct now is to reach for the nearest sound bite.

Let Your Mind Wander

That is why the smartest, most creative people know when to let the mind wander and when to knuckle down to hard work. In other words, when to be Slow and when to be Fast.

The first step is to relax—put aside impatience, stop struggling and learn to accept uncertainty and inaction. Wait for ideas to incubate below the radar, rather than striving to brainstorm them to the surface. Let the mind be quiet and still. As one Zen master put it, “Instead of saying ‘Don’t just sit there; do something’ we should say the opposite, ‘Don’t just do something; sit there.”