it's true -- going fast is good

speed encourages focus. when you go fast, there is simply less time to pay attention to things besides those relevant to your current objective. flow becomes inevitable, because no time is being allocated to things that might break it. you're moving from handhold to handhold, climbing the mountain in one unendingly smooth motion. while you're still learning to trust the fact that work should feel good, entering flow-via-speed is like this is exhilarating, even life-affirming. wow. this is what i've been missing out on my entire life. of course this feels good. flow feels great. wow. this is so awesome. let's go--

-- then you hit a blocker -- and you will hit a blocker -- all that flowing speed crashes to a halt -- and you feel like shit.

if you don't care about your work, blockers aren't a big deal. everything is a blocker, all in the way of whatever non-work activities you (might) rather be doing. but when you do care about your work, or you're learning to, blockers suck really hard. You know how good moving fast is, and suddenly you can't. There's a tons of possible negative conditioning in that these sudden shifts, from "I am going fast and work feels good" to "I am going slow and work feels awful". If the pain of crashing to a halt outweighs the joy of moving fast, then you're going to have a very hard time continuing to fall in love with hard work. So it's imperative to learn to deal with it gracefully, instead.

The solution is a very simple realization -- slow is fine.

slow is inevitable. slow is going to happen. it's fine. maybe, if we're being a bit more specific, we could say "i am still fine when i'm going slow", but if we're shortening this to the same brevity as "fast as good", it becomes "slow is fine"

slow is fine.

it's a bit paradoxical, and a sort of thick-skulled instagram grindset guy might pipe up here and say i'm coping, i am lazy and ngmi -- but you should ignore him, because failing to learn to gracefully handle blockers is going to fucking wreck you. you -- my reader, who has or at least empathizes with a strained relationship to work -- is not going to successfully solve work-related negative emotions by gritting your teeth and pushing on the gas pedal harder. you already have more than enough negative emotions around work.

in a pragmatic sense, believing "slow is bad" does absolutely nothing for you. all it does is creates this new category of self-critiquing thought -- "i am not fast, ergo i am bad" -- that fills time between actions -- which takes you further away from fast.

this means, on a long enough timeframe, you are faster when you accept that slow is fine.

(assuming you already take "fast is good" for granted, of course)

the times when you hit walls and don't know how to make progress and can't think straight are the absolute last times you need to be wasting time bullying yourself for not knowing how to make progress and not being able to think straight. you cannot negatively condition yourself into going fast because going fast is the lack of superfluous thoughts, including negative self-critique!

slow-is-fine is the optimal way to start accelerating again. you are making a promise not to waste time bullying yourself for the current lack-of-speed; and as such, you're bringing your step-by-step mental actions that much closer to one another -- you are beginning to accelerate again. Slow is fine is a nothing-statement, and nothing is the optimal amount of time to waste on things that take you away from moving fast .

now of course there's meta levels to this. if you don't really believe it, and are just trying to cast it like a spell -- 'slow is fine (because that'll get me going fast again, and fast is good)' you can pretty easily miss the point entirely, slipping some kind of higher-order abstract negative mental flailing. relax. you've hit a blocker. the goal here is to recognize that this is normal, so there's no need to waste time freaking out about it. you want to go fast. you will go fast again. it's fine.

you have to actually just be ok with being slow for a bit. consider a short walk around the block. if you can't justify talking a short walk when you're totally blocked, you probably haven't really accepted that slow is fine, slow is inevitable sometimes, and anything other than making peace with that is just getting in the way of going fast again. and you will go fast again.

and fast is good.