Day 2 of 21

Who are you proving it to

Yesterday you put a pause before your actions. Today I want to look at what was pushing from behind.

When I asked myself what rushing felt like, the honest answer was not "I am short on time." It was "I am trying to prove I can do this quickly." Quickly. Not correctly. Somewhere, speed had become the measure of being good, and correctness had become the thing I assumed would take care of itself.

It did not take care of itself.

Here is the trap. When you solve a problem to prove something, you are no longer asking "what is the answer?" You are asking "how fast can I show I am smart?" Those are different questions, and the second one makes you worse at the first. A chess player trying to look strong blunders more than one trying to not lose a pawn. An engineer trying to look fast ships the bug.

Performing and thinking do not happen at the same time. The brain that is watching itself be impressive is not the brain that is looking at the problem.

Name the audience

So who is watching? Be specific. A colleague who seems quicker than you. An interviewer you have not met yet. A partner. A younger version of yourself who was told you were gifted. Your own voice.

Write the name down. One line. "I am rushing to prove to ___ that I am ___."

Most people find the audience is nobody who is actually in the room. That does not make the feeling go away, but it drains some of the urgency, because you cannot win a performance nobody is watching.

Change the metric

For the next two weeks, speed is not a metric. At all. There is exactly one measure of a task: was it right.

A maths problem that takes forty minutes and is correct is a win. A coding problem that takes two hours and passes is a win. A chess game that goes to move sixty and you do not blunder is a win, even if you lose. Fast and wrong is zero. Not partial credit. Zero.

This will feel like going backwards. It is not. You are retraining the rhythm, and rhythm is trained at a speed where you can still hear it.

Baseline

Today we take a measurement, so that in three weeks you have something more honest than a feeling.

Set a timer for ten minutes. Do ten problems of a type you are supposedly good at. Mental arithmetic, easy coding problems, chess puzzles at a level below your rating. Anything with a clear right or wrong. Count two things:

• How many you got wrong.
• How many you got wrong and knew, a second later, that you had rushed.