Trust In The Process
Shortcuts are costly.
Nothing slows you down as much as taking a shortcut and by-pass a valuable process.
The temptation of a quick win is, in fact, a distraction FROM the process.
It is by going through the process that you grow. You learn and acquire a new skill and strive for mastery to position and operate on a level you earn.
Whatever is distracting you from it has the power to pull you away from that growth. Further away from that earned reward.
You can finally tell only by making it through the process and enjoying the ride. And that process is far from glamorous.
Take writing as an example; as Louie Bacaj states below, you will never reach the required quality or outcome if you don’t trust and enjoy the writing process.
What Louie signals in this tweet is more interesting than finding joy in a mentally demanding process. It is about becoming good, significant, and even seeking mastery.
Whatever your goal or calling is, there is typically a process. And that must be completed on time.
The only thing that matters is your intrinsic validation that you enjoy this process. You get assurance from within, enough to keep going and having FAITH and trusting the process without focusing too much on the external results.
In today’s society, we tend to rush things. By completing tasks and projects FAST, we seek external validation from our users, customers, readers, or audiences. Then we move on to the next one.
We move into this wheel of instant gratification of task completion. We are closing a transaction and responding quickly to a request. We might make two users happy by implementing that feature request. A so-called “low-hanging fruit.”
Picking down that low-hanging fruit is tempting. But we tend to forget that it is within that temptation of instant gratification and validation we create a culture of hurry sickness.
Treating Hurry Sickness
Hurry sickness can best be described through the behavior of not trying to make things better.
Picture this: You see a guy walking down a hill, leading a bike. He is exhausted and troubled. You ask him:
“Why don’t you hop on the bike and ride down the hill instead?”
Whereas he replied:
“I don’t have time.”
That is an extreme example of hurry-sickness.
In our day-to-day job, we might encounter this, but it is more subtle. You and your team may find yourselves in a position to try to satisfy stakeholders and customers and constantly say yes to requests.
It feels good since you are doing something; you act. But in reality, you re-act. You need to invest in time to make things better.
You are busy, and booking a one-hour retrospective per month wastes time. You know already what to do, right?
There is that nagging feeling, though, that psychological feeling that prevents us from doing better.
We cannot change; we don’t have time for change. “I mean, look at our backlog! We have all these user stories to complete; let’s finish them, THEN we can talk about change.”
We all get the point by now, what hurry-sickness is. And treating it requires a cultural shift and is not done within a day.
We will not try to seek a quick fix or simple answer on how to treat hurry-sickness. It is enough to be aware of it. We acknowledge it as a cultural dilemma in many (mainly Western) teams and organizations.
Without jumping to conclusions, there is this dopamine hit of getting things done. Finalizing those bunch of low-hanging fruits is much easier and more rewarding (short term).
More work to prioritize things/projects that may give payout in the future.
The hurry-sickness does make it harder for us, as individuals and teams, since we are constantly taking FROM the process.
Treating hurry-sickness for what it is and shifting the mindset into doing the hard, tedious, time-consuming work can pay off in the long run.
Maybe that will even put you in a position to learn a new skill…
Thank you for reading; chat soon!