Issue #023 — A letter on building slow when everyone is sprinting

Friend,

Everyone around me is sprinting and I am building slowly on purpose.

I want to put that down somewhere, partly so you can use it if you need it, and partly because the sprint culture has become so pervasive that even saying I am building slowly feels, on some days, like I am admitting to something.

The sprint logic looks like this. Move fast. Ship every week. Tweet about the ship. Iterate in public. Talk about traction. The slowness gets coded as fear, or perfectionism, or worse, a lack of urgency. The fastest shippers get the loudest applause. Junior builders absorb the lesson: speed is the metric.

There is a real thing inside this. Most projects die from being too slow, too cautious, too unshipped. Done is better than perfect is true at the level it is meant. I am not arguing against shipping. I am arguing against confusing the posture of speed with the fact of progress.

A lot of what I see being done fast is being done shallow. The prose is shallow. The product thinking is shallow. The relationship to the reader or the user is transactional. The work is built to be performed weekly, and the weekly performance has eaten the underlying thing it was meant to celebrate.

When I look at the work I most respect — the writers, the founders, the artists I keep returning to — almost none of them are sprinters. They have weekly outputs, sometimes; they also have multi-year arcs that do not appear in the weekly. The arcs are where the depth comes from. The weekly is the visible shoreline. The arc is the ocean.

Building slowly, on purpose, looks like: protecting six months for a thing that will not be visible in any of those months. Saying no to the small, fast wins that would interrupt it. Tolerating the discomfort of having nothing to show, while the work compounds in the background. Trusting that the year-three output will make the year-one silence look retroactively obvious.

I cannot prove this is the right strategy. I can tell you that almost every body of work I love was made this way, and almost none of it looked impressive in month four.

If you are quietly working on something long, you are not behind. You are doing the part that does not photograph.

Yours,
Enova