Two Speeds

Sloth in a tropical tree.

I have two speeds. Turbo and sloth.

I realized that they both get me to the same result, at around the same time. Most notably, I bypassed a year of college, took two years off, and then bypassed a year of law school. Yet I graduated law school at the same age I would have had I gone straight through.

That realization changed how I think about productivity, ambition, and the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be "on track."

We live in a culture obsessed with the straight line. Get good grades. Go to college. Go to graduate school. Get the job. Move up. Don’t stop. Don’t slow down. Don’t veer off course. The message is everywhere: the detour is the failure. The gap year is the warning sign on your resume that you'll spend the next decade explaining away.

But what if the detour was the path?

Here's what those two years off taught me that law school did not: how to be an adult. I needed that time to grow up. I needed that time to realize that life does not always move on the irrational timetable I set for myself. And if I look deep within, it wasn’t a complete pause. I wasn’t stagnant, I just wasn’t doing what I thought I would be doing with my life. In that time, twenty-year-old me managed a class of second graders in the toughest elementary school in California, going from not knowing how to manage my classroom, to passing all of the tests for my teaching credential and getting certified to teach kindergarten through twelfth grade.

This just was a plot line that wasn’t on my bingo card so I discounted it, thinking at the time that it was time wasted. But it wasn’t. In that time I learned more about human nature and connection, and how to command a room. Something that was not taught in law school or anywhere else.

And the sloth speed? That's not laziness. That's deliberateness. That's the period where I'm watching, absorbing, and building the foundation for the turbo burst that inevitably follows. Some of my best work has come after a period that felt like I was doing nothing at all.

As a lawyer, I think about this a lot in the context of my clients. So many of them come to me in a state of panic because something has gone sideways — a job loss, a contract dispute, a rights violation they didn't even know they had. And almost universally, the first thing they say is some version of: I should have moved faster. I should have seen this coming. I should have done something sooner.

Sometimes that's true. But more often, what I see is someone who was moving so fast they couldn't see what was happening around them. They signed agreements without reading them. They accepted terms without questioning them. They stayed in situations too long because they were too busy executing to stop and evaluate.

Speed, it turns out, is not always the asset we think it is. They sign because they're excited. They're moving fast. Turbo speed, but without the foundation.

The sloth moment — the pause, the deliberate read-through, the call to an attorney before signing — would cost some time but save so much aggravation in the long term.

I’m still working on toggling between my two speeds with more intention. Because I still sometimes panic in the slow periods, being accustomed to being in overdrive. The turbo mode comes when I've done the work, built the foundation, and I know where I'm going. But he sloth mode is not a failure state. It's the research phase. The observation phase. The are you sure about this? phase that makes the turbo sprint actually land somewhere worth going.

The best decisions I’ve made — personally and professionally — have come from knowing which speed the moment actually called for.

So if you're in a sloth period right now, feeling behind, feeling like everyone else is sprinting past you on some timeline you're supposed to be keeping up with: stop. Take a breath. Ask yourself whether the pace you're keeping is actually serving you, or whether you've just been too busy running to notice you're headed in the wrong direction.

The finish line isn't going anywhere. And you might just get there at exactly the right time.