We spend much of our lives staring at clocks. We check the time when we wake up. We watch deadlines approach. We measure projects by how quickly they're completed and judge success by how much we accomplish in a day, a month, a year.
Faster internet. Faster delivery. Faster growth. We celebrate productivity, efficiency, and hustle. We praise people who move quickly and businesses that scale rapidly. Yet for all the attention we give to speed, we rarely stop to ask whether we're actually headed somewhere worth going.
A clock can tell you how long you've been traveling. What it cannot tell you is whether you're heading in the right direction.
Perhaps that's why humanity learned to use the compass long before it perfected the mechanical clock. Before people worried about how quickly they would arrive, they first had to know where they were going. Somewhere along the way, many of us reversed that order - obsessing over speed before we'd established direction.
I've seen this play out firsthand. Years ago, a client came to me convinced they knew exactly what feature they needed built for their website. We had the budget, the timeline, and the technical ability to start immediately.
Instead, I started asking questions.
What problem are you actually trying to solve? What frustration are your customers running into? What outcome are you hoping this creates?
The more we talked, the more it became clear that what they were asking for wasn't the solution - it was their best guess at one. By slowing down and focusing on the destination rather than the speed of execution, we ended up building something entirely different. The final product became the centerpiece of their site and delivered far more value than the original request ever could have. Had we started building immediately, we would have moved quickly. We just would have been moving quickly in the wrong direction.
That experience cemented something for me: progress isn't measured by how fast you move. It's measured by whether your next step takes you closer to where you actually want to go.
I've learned the same lesson at the pool table.
After years of playing, it's easy to get comfortable. You glance at the layout and immediately think, I know exactly what to do here. That's usually when I get into trouble. There have been times I skipped my pre-shot routine - didn't walk the table, didn't check the angles from different vantage points — and simply trusted my first impression.
Only after the shot did I see what I'd missed. A better route. One that opened the table instead of leaving me fighting the same obstacle two shots later.
The failure wasn't about knowledge. I had enough of that. It was about assuming I already had enough — and moving before I actually did.
The few seconds I thought I was saving ended up costing me far more.
Life works the same way. We become so confident in our first answer, our first plan, our first impression, that we stop exploring other possibilities. We mistake familiarity for certainty. Sometimes the most valuable thing we can do is pause long enough to walk around the table.
The older I get, the more I believe that most of life's biggest mistakes aren't caused by moving too slowly. They're caused by moving quickly in the wrong direction. A career built on the wrong priorities. A business spending years solving the wrong problem. A relationship drifting because the important conversations kept getting postponed. In each case, the issue isn't speed. The issue is direction.
The world will always push you to move faster. There will always be another deadline, another opportunity, another reason to hurry. But before you ask how quickly you can get somewhere, make sure it's somewhere worth going.
A clock can tell you how long you've been traveling. Only a compass can tell you whether you're headed home.