The Real Hustle Is Not Speed, It Is Strategic Patience
You just ran two traffic lights and nearly crashed your bike on the Third Mainland Bridge, all to make a deadline that was probably artificial. This relentless Lagos urgency? It is not making you rich; it is quietly ensuring you make the wrong decision faster than everyone else.
We have been sold a lie that motion equals success, but the smartest players in the game know that the true competitive advantage lies not in being the quickest, but in being the most deliberate. Anyone can rush a move; it takes discipline to pause.
The actual cost of cleaning up a poor decision far outweighs the few extra hours you would have spent thinking it through. This isn’t motivation talk; it is strategic math. Studies show that simply forcing leaders to use a slower, more conscious thought process is as effective as giving them a financial incentive to perform better (Per a 2025 study on decision-making).
And... this is where the science hits different. Your brain needs the downtime. Constant work leads to what neurologists call decision fatigue, but mindfulness practices are proven to increase your working memory capacity and the ability to sustain attention, making your eventual move surgically precise (American Psychological Association, 2012).
But you still feel the pressure of the clock. So start small. For any decision that truly matters—anything that cannot be easily reversed-impose a 24-Hour Rule. You have to walk away and let your subconscious mind work on the problem while you are sleeping or just watching the world.
Do not mistake that break for laziness. That pause-while you smell the sharp diesel and dust of the rushing traffic outside your window-is the moment your mind makes the connections your panic would have missed. You come back not just rested, but smarter.
What catastrophic mistake are you currently trying to outrun with speed?