A Life Lesson I Wrote Cause I Was Bored
Hey, there! It’s me!
The urge for creativity, the urge for enlightenment, to read those books you want to read, see those movies/tv-series on that recommended list that never ends, to explore mathematics, science, and philosophy, all of these urges always arise during the beloved semester examinations (one which I am currently undergoing).
And so, I realized it’s been quite a while since I wrote a Medium article for the sake of it, and there have been these things bubbling at the surface within, that I wanted to type out and tell people who never asked me in the first place.
Wow, writing is fun, this feels like millennia since I did this, can’t wait to get into this!
I wanted to write a series of life lessons, that I gathered from cats meowing, Rubiks Cubes, Tumblr posts, Reddit threads, YouTube comments, Twitter insights, and more. I intended to put a bunch of them in this article but it’s way too much content so I am just going to put one per article! Yay!
So, here is just the first of five beautiful productivity/life lessons I learned from various places, which I seem unqualified to give at the tender young age of 21, in a Medium article for you! (If that felt like a reiteration of the title, well, it is, you got me.)
Go Slow to Go Fast — A Rubik’s Cube Insight
(Yay, we are starting off with a counter-intuitive lesson! Those seem fun, all the self-help books use them!)
So, I was reading a sample of a non-fiction book, a year back or so I believe, and it was a man who was on a quest to get faster at solving the Rubik’s Cube. It was rather a fascinating extract, and like all interesting YouTube videos we consume, I forgot about it as soon as I encountered the next one.
Context: Rubik’s Cube solves are insane if you are unfamiliar, the world record is 3.47 seconds. A Google machine says that a cube can be solved in 20 moves or less from any position and so much more. Once you learn one of the traditional methods and practice, you should eventually come to a solve time of a minute plus maybe a 30 seconds. However, below a minute, and getting even lower is pretty difficult and quite a task to achieve. Every second counts.
However, there was one very interesting thing that stuck with me from the sample. The man was told by an adept Rubik’s Cube solver, if you want to lower your ‘solve time’ even more, go slow to go fast. Naturally, the man was in disbelief but he gave it a shot, and voila, he managed to shorten it further by another 20 seconds.
What happened there?
They didn’t really explain further so I had to theorize and this is pretty much my theory about what happened. Also, you may be wondering how does being quicker at solving a Rubik’s cube be considered a life lesson?
Well, this is just not my theory, but also something I believe is applicable to all activities we partake in, and is something we already apply. (Remember how you get tensed doing something and a friend tells you to relax and take it slow, and you say to yourself, hmmmm, alright, it’s fine, it’s okay, and after a while, you seem to be able to do your job pretty well?)
Go Slow To Go Fast.
When you instinctively try to go fast, at a point when you are expected to hit certain deadlines, there is pressure on you to perform (maybe because you have always excelled in the past, or maybe because you never have and this is your last chance to prove your worth), you derail yourself. At the very first possible chance of failure, your fears compound, and then you make yourself more likely to fail, and then inevitably, you fail.
On the other hand, what happens when you go slow? In this situation, slow doesn’t mean you should purposefully make yourself slow, but instead, don’t try to go fast.
When you relax mentally, you allow yourself the chance of failure.
This is fine, because I can screw up! Since I can screw up, I am not scared of screwing up! Since I am not scared of screwing up, I am not thinking about it, hence, I just have to focus on what I am doing right now and that seems easy!
In other words, allowing yourself the chance of failure removes any possible fears of failure! Less fears of failure in your mind, more positive mindset that allows you to focus solely on the task on hand!
Now, this doesn’t mean that if you try to go fast, it’s bad.
When you learn a new skill, you first struggle with it. Then you get a grasp of it. Once you get a grasp, you push yourself further and further. There will very probably a point that you reach where you have pushed yourself so far, but you are simply not getting better! Then, at that point, is when you can try the tactic of ‘Go Slow to Go Fast’.
Thank you, that’s all from me!
Stay tuned for four more lessons in the future.
I should probably do work and go study.
Au reservoir!
If you liked my writings, you can also check out almost everything I have written over here at:
