One of the biggest challenges for any entrepreneur or team leader, is to keep a sense of urgency among your team. This was the top thing keeping over eleven thousand executives up at night, according to Jason Jennings and Laurence Haughton in 'The High Speed Company' (2015).
But not all high-speed endeavors are equal, and running fast carries with it the additional responsibility of running in the right direction, while doing the right things. And of course - making all the running fun as well. Juggling all these things can get tricky.
I discovered this young. When I was about five years old, I had just graduated from tricycle to bicycle and figured it was high time to take on some more adult-like challenges. I had been salivating over the huge hill that I frequently saw teenagers tear down just on the end of my street on their BMX bikes and skateboards, so I snuck away and rode my bike up to the very top.
Coming down that hill the first time at high speed was perhaps the best feeling I'd had in my early life. The freedom of it, of finally being grown up. But I knew I could do better. I knew I could reach breakneck speed, like I'd seen the older kids do. I wondered how they did it. Was it their bikes? Their superior height? I replayed in my mind how I'd seen the other kids ride down, and I recalled how many of them had taken their feet off the pedals.
Feet off the pedal. I could do that. So this time, as I pedalled down the hill I gently slipped my shoes from the kiddy strap, losing one shoe in the process and et voila! My speed at least doubled. Then, I began brainstorming, as I tore down the hill. If this was how fast I could go when I only removed my feet from the pedals, imagine how fast I could go if I took my hands off too!!!
You can guess the rest. Point being: bravery, ingenuity and out-of-the-box thinking are all well and good, but they won't stop you from winding up in the ER with three stitches and a concussion when you move fast on the wrong strategy.
It's hard to do what's right, when our whole life seems to happen faster than ever before. Inundated with the speed of instant communications, apps popping messages from co-workers, friends, family, brands, across gmail, chat, slack, trello, facebook, twitter, instagram and many more, it's easy to mistake all this activity, for productivity and progress. In fact, this whole dopamine-induced loop can often trick high-speed people into creating urgency around the wrong things.
I love going fast. I enjoy the thrill of rapid execution, the excitement of it, the impossible challenges that mount up, that you get to stare down, and beat. But I know there's a risk to being rudderless, to waking up one morning and realizing you've beat every obstacle the world has thrown at you, but you've still wound up in the wrong place.
One weekly practice that's helped me a lot as I've seen my technology company Shareablee grow from 2 to now over seventy people very quickly, has been to take time every weekend (usually Sunday afternoon), to really think about the two to three critical things that simply must happen in the week that's approaching, and to review my overall goals for the year and how I'm progressing. It gives me a north star when the world is melting around me, and helps me keep myself and my team on track amidst the haze of drama and urgency (real or contrived) that comprises the business week.
In the end, it's human to steer in the direction of your focus, and without consistently refocusing it's all-too-easy to simply get swept up into whatever crosses your path, or into someone else's plan of what you should be doing. But neither will serve you well. Unless you and your company are evolving faster than the world is changing around you, then it's almost impossible to stay ahead of the curve. And when you're forever playing catchup and making ill-thought out trade-offs, there is only grief on the horizon.