Tortoise in a Hare’s world
One of my favorite thought experiments goes something like this: Pick any moment from human history in which to intervene and change the course of civilization.
I’m from the future and I’m here to tell you that the combustion engine is a terrible mistake.
Really, I’m from the 21st century but I often feel like I don’t quite belong here. You could call me an interloper, a luddite, a late-to-never adopter. Moving through the world at my own pace—which is about 3 or 4 miles per hour—I’m generally always trying to scale things back, slow things down. Everything good takes time. The mighty oak tree doesn’t really get going until its at least fifty years old.
You might be wondering: What does this have to do with branding, exactly?
When you name things for a living, you get used to a certain expectation of speed. Someone wants to talk right way, they’d like to start tomorrow, and they need a name yesterday. Maybe the urgency is coming from a real place—a cease and desist that came in the mail, a launch date that’s set in stone, the desire to be first to market, or some other milestone that’s causing their team to run around on a steady supply of adrenaline and cortisol.
But more often than not, that urgency—like so many other behaviors that are really just bad habits formed without thinking—is based on a fiction. And like so many of the lies we tell ourselves, it’s actually pretty harmful and counterproductive to our goals.
When a potential client is driven by timeline above all else, or they take breakneck speed to be a given, I’m not very keen to hop in their car. For one thing, I rather like my neck the way it is. That is, in one piece.
Listen, we’re not trying to be slow for the sake of being slow. We’re not trying to punish people for their indoctrination into the cult of busyness. From my perspective, we’re just trying to embody the title of that Baldessari painting: SOLVING EACH PROBLEM AS IT ARISES.
This means doing things in the proper order. Which requires having time to think through the details, ask the right questions, understand the full context, and develop the kind of relationship that allows us to really get somewhere.
While it may be counterintuitive to some folks, having a “slow” mindset actually allows us to move more quickly—because we’re able to think through and resolve obstacles to a successful outcome in real time, instead of blindly tripping over them while hurtling at high speeds. Slow is smooth smooth is fast.
When we tell folks to slow down, what we’re really saying is: let’s get where we’re going more quickly than if we rushed.
