Why Trying to Speed Up Keeps You Behind

When a competitor ships the feature you've been planning for months...

Or when a founder who started when you did raises a round twice the size of yours...

Many founders would instantly feel like they're behind and need to catch up.

So they do the obvious thing. They speed up. They add to the list, push the team harder, compress the timeline, and tell themselves this is just what building a startup demands.

What almost no one stops to consider is that trying to speed up is the thing putting them further behind.

From my experience coaching some of the world's best founders, the fear of falling behind has very little to do with the competitor.

That fear and the constant urge to make progress feed each other, and both were running long before you had a startup, or a rival to lose to.

How Far Back Does It Go?

Sit with this for a second: how far back would you have to go to find a version of yourself who didn't feel there was something you still needed to accomplish? Most people can't remember ever not feeling that way.

You'd already learned, long ago, not to let yourself feel you'd arrived. There was always one more thing to do first, one more box to check before you could rest and actually enjoy where you are. The urge to keep making progress isn't something your startup handed you. You walked in with it.

The fear of falling behind is based on a story, one that goes hand in hand with the habit of always needing to check the next box. It's the comparing version of that same pattern, the part of you that measures yourself against everyone else. A competitor or a peer gives it a number to point at, so it feels urgent and external. But the conclusion that you're behind is a story your mind builds and believes, until you're living inside it as if it were real.

When you start a company, all of this projects onto it. You take the future you want, the round you haven't raised, the revenue you don't have yet, the team you wish were already firing on all cylinders, and you relate to it as if you should already be there.

And since you can't be anywhere other than where you actually are, that turns into frustration: the friction between where you are and where you think you should already be. That friction is what you feel as falling behind, even at the end of a genuinely good day.

What Trying to Speed Up Does to You

Once the fear is in the driver's seat, the urgency it generates works against you in three ways that compound.

It runs on adrenaline. A lot of us are, in a real sense, adrenaline junkies. We get used to that fight-or-flight charge and start treating it as a cheap substitute for feeling genuinely alive. Then we justify it at the altar of the startup: we have to move this fast, this is what the moment demands. Most of the time it's closer to an addiction. The system has simply learned to feel uncomfortable without the frenetic energy.

It trades the important for the urgent. Haste makes waste. When you move too fast, you handle the urgent things and let the important ones slide, which creates more urgent things, which means you have to move faster still. You end up sprinting to put out fires you started by sprinting.

It convinces you to carry everything yourself. Founders are capable, so the fear whispers that the fastest path is to do it all. The opposite is usually true. When you slow down enough to see the bigger picture, you get more resourceful: you ask for help, build systems, bring the right people in. Running faster on your own treadmill is how you stay exactly where you are.

Put the three together and you get a downward spiral. Moving too fast creates more fires, so you move faster to put them out, which creates even more. You end up running faster and faster just to keep up with the mess the speed is making.

Slow Down to Get Ahead

What you actually want underneath the urge to move faster is effectiveness. Give a coal miner and Sam Altman the same twenty-four hours, and the difference in what each one creates is so vast it's hard to argue, with a straight face, that what matters is how fast you're moving. There's a reason the saying goes slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

So when you feel the pull to accelerate, try the opposite:

• Slow down enough to see clearly. Most of the leverage is in choosing the few things that actually matter, and you can't choose well at a sprint.
• Ask for the help you've been refusing. Carrying it all yourself is the slow path dressed up as the fast one.
• Prioritize well, then let the rest go. You will never get more done than the day allows, no matter how behind you feel.

Then sit with one question this week: if you let go of the belief that you're behind, what would you choose to do next?

The race against the clock you feel is all in your head.

Come back to the hours you actually have and the work actually in front of you. It's always the present moment, and in each moment, you're simply doing what you're doing. That's the only place the work ever gets done.

With love,

Dave Kashen