Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost
The question isn't fast versus slow. It's whether you can tell wandering from drifting.
John Kinson 1 min read
There’s a kind of productivity that looks like progress from outside and feels like burning from inside. Always shipping, calendar full, metrics green. Nothing compounds.
Most urgency is manufactured, but not maliciously — it’s the shape of the channel. When everything can be messaged instantly, everything feels like it needs an instant reply.
Not all wandering is productive. Wandering has a question underneath it. Drifting has only momentum.
The people who consistently produce work worth reading aren’t slow thinkers. They’re slow in the right places. Fast on the things that don’t matter, so they can be slow on the one or two that do. Thirty seconds on the Slack message, three weeks on the paragraph.