Going Slow Is the #1 Sign of a Truly Successful Person Living a Badass Life
It's the opposite of hustle culture
The world is speeding up so fast that we’ve all become coke addicts.
But this 40 year old man I met is slowing down. He’s hard to contact. He hates email. He hates WhatsApp even more. He makes high 6-figures but he’s not Lambo-rich.
He lives in an expensive part of Europe so he can’t lounge around sipping Pina Coladas by the pool. Housing is expensive there. Over the last year I’ve noticed he’s become really, really slow.
He works every day but only for about 4 hours. Networking is something he does a lot less of. He posts hardly any pictures of him or his family online anymore. When I ask him to do something small for me his default answer is no.
He’s completely checked out.
The scary part is I’ve noticed this same “going slow” trend among other big creators and entrepreneurs I’m friends with or who I follow online.
Conventional success on social media is nothing more than a bad fart joke
The way social media and mainstream news describe success is the opposite.
It’s all about going fast, using AI to get more work done, using productivity apps, working long hours, being married to your work, and working weekends.
You should go fast in the beginning, but not forever. Otherwise, all you are is a glorified 9-5 employee with an invisible dictator boss whipping your butt with a naughty whip they bought from a s3x toy shop at 1 AM.
I believe in hard work and doing work you love. My goal has always been to go fast up until a point. I haven’t completely ground to a halt yet but I am in the slow down phase.
People who have the luxury to go slow are the truly wealthy people.
It’s a goal every one of you should aim for, instead of the traditional vanity metrics that’ll melt your heart and destroy your family.
Going slow is high status
(It’s the replacement American Dream.)
Slower in meetings
Everyone wants to turn a 2-hour meeting into 15 minutes because Gary Vee said so.
But true freedom is letting a meeting run over time because you’re having a blast. In banking, I used to have customer meetings that were scheduled for 1 hour and went for 8 hours. I’m not joking.
I remember one meeting. Tech client came to Australia from the US. They were supposed to have a 1-hour meeting with me and my boss. That turned into lunch.
We then went on a walk along the Yarra River. That turned into us having a few cheeky alcoholic drinks at the Melbourne Casino. Before I knew it, a 1 hour meeting had turned into 8.
I shouldn’t admit this, but that day is so nostalgic to me it makes me emotional.
The luxury of having a slow meeting and really getting to connect with someone without a stopwatch ticking in your brain is a glorious feeling.
Slower with hitting goals
Everyone wants to achieve their goal in 30 days or 1 year.
But when you have the freedom to go slow, you no longer want tight timeframes anymore. The coolness of chasing a 10-year goal feels more motivating. That means some periods of growth are slow and others are faster.
A goal that takes a long time to achieve feels sweeter.
Slower in presentations
The average webinar, Powerpoint presentation, or company townhall feels like you’re watching a coked up rat desperate for some cheese run through a maze.
Fast presentations miss the nuance. The speaker is so full of anxiety it bleeds into your day, even if in the hours leading up to it, you were more chill than a monk in the middle of a sacred meditation.
Sitting through a slow presentation with gaps of silence and plenty of question time is glorious. Yet most people are so addicted to back-to-back appointments they’ve never experienced this level of slowness.
Get in rooms where you can give slower presentations.
Slower in conversations
Going slow in conversations helps you listen more than you talk.
You hear things you don’t when the conversation is moving faster than a sports commentator commentating on the Super Bowl live.
In slow conversations everybody feels heard. That leads to deep insights, more vulnerability, and better storytelling. A slow conversation feels like you’re with friends instead of with a used car salesman at the car yard talking smack after a hit of crack.
Slower in life
BowTiedSalesGuy on X shared an interesting story.
He was in a sales meeting. The prospect he was selling to started taking deep breaths out of nowhere. Super weird.
“Everything okay?”
The prospect looked at him confused as hell.
“All good. Just grounding myself so I stay present.”
When you slow down in life you become more present and non-reactive, which gives you 10x more control. It also makes you look high status.
People who have the freedom to go slow have less anxiety and their life overall is more enjoyable as a result.
Real freedom is the luxury to go slow when everyone else is going too fast.
How to become wealthy enough so that you can go slow
By now you should be sold on going slow.
But to get to this way of life you need a level of wealth that lets you slow things down. Here are the key ideas I see my network using to live a slower life.
1. Build uncommon leverage
I often tell people to think like a business.
It’s confusing. You’re an idiot Tim. What I mean is, think like an owner. The most basic form of leverage is labor. You hire people to do the sh*t you don’t want to do.
If you don’t understand leverage you’ll never be free.
Many people start with the idea of building their own business. It’s good in theory. But 90% of people, if they do build a business, accidentally create a new 9-5 job. Why? They don’t create a business with leverage.
This means they do all of the work. They’re too cheap to get help to grow their business faster. And they won’t even make small investments of like $100 to buy AI text-to-audio tools that can save them hours of typing on a keyboard every day.
Then the money they do make they just blow on stupid sh*t. They don’t use their money to make more money on auto-pilot through investing. So they get stuck on a business hamster wheel that they can never get off.
If they try to slow down they feel terror. If they try to make a change, it feels worse than death and creates a nightmare that this one change will send them back to a job.
Business isn’t the only form of leverage. There’s digital leverage too. This translates to posting on social media.
Whenever I say this the potato head critics come out of their local McDonald’s and throw peanuts at me.
“That’s a make money online pyramid scheme. Post. Make money. Then make more money by showing people to post. It’s so meta, man.”
Idiots. Social media gives you distribution. It gives you attention on your work, ideas, and business. That leads to this outcome:
Build distribution, then build whatever you want – Jack Butcher
Software further builds your leverage. It’s like a digital employee on a slave subscription wage. I use software like Zapier to automate stuff so I don’t have to complete as many tasks.
You don’t win in business by working hard or being more productive. You win with leverage.
2. Proactively design your lifestyle (or it’ll be designed for you by drongos)
To reach the “going slow” stage of life, you must design your life that way.
Many people don’t design a life. They just focus on the now with no why or strategy as to how they’ll reach personal freedom. The now then traps them. Priorities take over. Then babies pop out. Or bosses start giving out more work.
Within a year they’ve forgotten where their life is heading. They’re grinding out but with no pathway to become free. It’s sad. I get emotional about this too. Literal lives wasted. Hours with children gone because of no free time.
Lifestyle design isn’t complicated.
Get a job. Learn some skills. Make some money.
Build a side hustle with built-in leverage.
Invest leftover money into financial assets to make more money.
When your 9-5 job income becomes less than all your other income, quit the corporate rat race.
Build your business. Hire people to do some of the work. Buy software to do more of the work. Optimize for freedom.
This is how you end up at the holy grail of being able to go slow.
3. Chase obsession and extreme focus
“I gotta lot of things going on Timbo.”
And that’s why you’re dirt poor and drinking McDonald’s thickshakes out of a straw you found on the ground.
I have one priority. You’re reading it. I write. That’s what I do. I don’t sing. I don’t dance for dollar bills. I don’t go to stage shows. Again, I write. One thing. Forever.
Obsession is a faster path to living a slow life than any other option.
It takes the output of your work and compounds it harder than Warren Buffet’s investment portfolio. Success is the result of embracing the power of only doing one thing. Everything else is a shiny object that’ll make you a slave to society.
Final Thought
Stick your Lambo, Gucci handbags, and LA mansion up your ass. I worship the truly wealthy people who are going slow.
Let me know in the comments if I’ve completely lost the plot or not … and why.
P.S. Going slow works sometimes, but right now, you need to move fast if you want to book a seat for next week's free masterclass:
How to Get 100,000 Impressions on LinkedIn With Just 15 Minutes Per Day.
My LinkedIn masterclasses are easily the most popular.
And -- seats are limited.
I've been going slow ever since 2017. It is a very deliberate process. Well worth the effort. it takes real effort to wind down. Comparable to quiting smoking. You can be ten yrs post quitting and get cravings. It those times that can derail everything. The intentionally and planning is essential in living a royal life.
Going slow is the highest form of luxury and self-discipline. Going slow for me and my company means that we are taking everything one mindful step at a time. We are fine tuning and honing our systems and methods. Going slow means it takes time. Time to thoughtfully process and savor each step. It takes great self-discipline to go slow. Many times, immediate gratification or results is expected. It is empty. True results worth having comes from going slow and taking your time. Choosing every step of the way.