Speed is everything

Slow is fake

Sam Altman noticed that speed can be crucial for founders: "You know, years ago I wrote a little program to look at this [speed], like how quickly our best founders — the founders that run billion-plus companies — answer my emails versus our bad founders. I don’t remember the exact data, but it was mind-blowingly different. It was a difference of minutes versus days on average response times". Peter Thiel is more bullish on speed: "If you have a 10-year plan of how to get [somewhere], you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months". Nat Friedman recalls that "A week is 2% of the year". So, being fast is important, sometimes extremely.

Examples of how I'm trying to be fast:

1. quickly respond to colleagues at work (within 5 minutes in the messenger and always within half a day by email)
2. set short deadlines for my tasks and cases and meet them accurately
3. I try to finish the book / movie at one time so I havn't to remember the context for continuing in the next time
4. choose fast solutions rather than high-quality ones

Examples where slowness annoys me:

1. migration departments, in particular Lithuania, where I am trying to get permanent residence (!!!)
2. long response (> half of the day) from colleagues at work / academy / other stuff
3. the slowness of the corporation, where it is very real to make one small product for a year or two
4. any long technical response (> 3 seconds) from the server (application) I use‍

Possible reasons for slowness:

1) a bureaucratic structure, which is why it is necessary to coordinate the decision with many other people and carry it through a certain pipeline

2) there is no sense of urgency - the now popular ideas of slow living and work-life balance "relax" people, worsening the service for end users

3) regulators, it seems to me, are too protective of the rights of workers, for example, they prohibit working more than 40 hours a week, which also leads to a deterioration in service

4) simply, slowness is a much more convenient and less costly strategy than haste, although this does not explain the presence of cross-country differences in the speed of services

Questions:

1) There are countries with a greater culture of excellence and therefore faster - for example, Russia with its strange economy is much faster than MOST of the richest countries in the world in almost all services - why?

2) Does the speed of services and the pace of life in general in a country affect its GDP?

3) Why have we stopped inspiring speed as a society? Except for a couple of geeks like Patrick and Mark no one else seems to be impressed by speed

4) If speed affects the potential success of a person (see Sam Altman's observation), then how can we instill in an individual a sense of urgency?

5) Is it possible to somehow measure the "speed" of certain countries?

6) What are the fastest companies and bureaucratic organizations? Especially interested in public services

7) What technological and social innovations can speed up our processes by an order of magnitude? (for example, transport or migration)?

8) How in different historical eras people looked at speed and urgency?