When I still believed I would take my country to the World Cup, my coach advised me to be like Juan Román Riquelme.
He knew how to control the pace of the game. When everyone was moving fast, he would slow down. When everyone was slow, he would catch you flatfooted and pump up the speed of the game. He was a maestro.
How can I forget the advice of a coach who wanted me to be sponsored to represent my country in the children’s World Cup in Sweden?
While his advice was solely about how to guide my team as a midfielder, I recognize that it applies now more than ever to myself and anyone who has internet access and a mobile phone.
I used to lie to myself that when I got a smartphone, I would transform into an insane genius. I would read all the books I could get my hands on. At the time, I had a flip LG phone. I didn’t consider it a smartphone. To me, a smartphone was a touch screen. Yeah, I was dumb.
When I got one, I wanted to read as fast as I could. I wanted to get ahead of the curve. I bumped into speed reading and tried it. It didn’t make sense. I would later wonder why people would attend seminars and conferences on it.
At the same time, my brother handed me the first series of George R.R. Martin’s books, Game of Thrones. It was thick and heavy with epic adventure. That’s when I began to slow down. Seriously, slow down.
At the time, my peers were preparing for the SATs. It was the first time I heard about them. Others had been prepping throughout high school. My favourite section was critical thinking. I liked this section because I would dissect it to my delight, but the only problem? Time.
How could you combine critical thinking with speed? I found these two qualities at odds with each other. I didn’t like it. I wanted to slow down. Just when I was done covering a few questions, our appointed tutor would shout the remaining time. That’s when I knew I could never let my curiosity reign inside a room with time-bound test requirements.
I encountered something similar in medical school. Oliver Kiaye, a good friend and now a doctor, recommended the book on pharmacology by Goodman and Gilman. We had started our campus journey in the same class, but I deferred to complete an intercalated course. By the time I was done, he was a year ahead of me. Thus, he advised which books carried depth. Of course, I’d pick depth.
I once recall taking several weeks imbibing malaria and antimalarial drugs. The book covered the clinical manifestation, the pathogenesis, complications, and the preferred treatments. It also touched on the expected human genomic variants and their responses to the different medications. I had bequeathed myself an expert by the time I was done.
But the examination was a few days away.
It was not going to test malaria only. I was a master of one, but a fancy novice on the rest. I didn’t like it.
That’s when I started peeling the issues with the structure of medical school, prepared a manuscript, but didn’t want to share it because it would soon circulate within the school. I figured that if my lecturers read my conclusions about the overwhelming effects of randomness on the success of medical students, and thus belittle their efforts, they would intentionally fail me. I had to be smart about it.
Fast forward, and I’m now a critical care medical doctor. I love reading, and after experimenting with all the fast options the world offers (at least I think I have sampled a good number), I couldn’t stress the importance of slowing down.
Conversations with the dead
I was shocked that Mortimer Adler and I shared the same conclusions about books: Books are conversations with the author.
When I picked up The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper, I imagined him seated arm's length from me in my room. He was patient with me and would stop to answer my numerous questions mid-sentence.
I couldn’t imagine anyone more patient than him. He would let me take a walk, pondering his ideas and concepts, finding parallels with my experiences and reality, and developing counterarguments.
This was how the book would sing to me:
Let me love you.
By fighting with myself and with the book, I fell in love. I needed to slow down.
Most online content is created by the living. So many people contribute that it seems meaningless, my work included. But conversations with the dead have the timely quality that they have nothing else to prove. They don’t need to schedule their posts every so often in the middle of the week.
They don’t need to be alive to share their wisdom.
The authors, however, continue to live through their work. And they will not rush you. They will not follow their work with another. They will let you slow down.
Reading a book is no different from taking a raw carrot, bite after bite. The first bite reveals the flesh underneath. Breaking the turgor with every bite as it rattles between your teeth is the inescapable fight you have with the laid-down ideas.
The nutrients are invisible relative to the evident mechanical breakdown. You have to slow down. You cannot rush a good book.
Furthermore, a good book is hardly any different from a good conversation. You don’t know how it ended where it did, the trajectory it took, and it is never rushed. You have to slow down. When talking with Karl Popper, I could hear Skip Marley’s words in the background:
I care, I care for you,
More than my own self.
Deep.
In contrast, online content is fast, high-octane, and easily consumed. It hardly needs the carrot-crushing phase. It wouldn’t be any different from water seeping through a semi-permeable barrier. This form of osmotic learning hardly leaves residues stuck between your teeth the way reading does.
Not audiobooks. Reading. Audio books hardly give you the chance to question and pause. I tried the audio version of a New Yorker article once and vowed never to try an audiobook. It may be a different experience from reading, but I prefer flipping the pages as I consume it, with the indistinct voice inside my head.
Plus, audiobooks don’t require your full concentration. You’re not having a conversation. You’re more passive, like a lecture. We don’t learn best through lectures.
I can liken audiobooks to a blender. You take the vegetable, and as quickly as it is inserted, it is broken down and ready to be taken as a semi-solid content. It’s better than the free flow of air-like fluid, but not as thick and heavy as the raw solid material.
It’s still not slow enough.
At the risk of choosing the cliche and overused concept, I can use the example of Heisenberg’s principle. You pick one: position or momentum. Momentum gives you haziness. You don’t know where to stand. That’s where most people reside. Nothing to hold them down. Freya calls this doubt. The infestation of doubt thrives through the distraction economy.
The alternative is position. Mass helps. You don’t even need to move. You need to slow down to understand your position. You cannot drop hefty points if you don’t slow down. You need to be well-grounded, like an obelisk, to stand for what you defend. You need to slow down to the point of stillness to be identifiable. As Anu defends the need to make something heavy, the needed tradeoff is slowing down.
The deception of the Red Queen effect has a social side to it. Since everyone is doing it, it gets social proof. But slowing down does the opposite. And that’s why it’s noticeable. It’s odd. It remains. It sticks.
What I’m trying to say is…
As my coach advised, we need to be like Juan Román Riquelme.
Moving fast when everyone else is slow is not compatible with our current realities. Everyone wants the shortest and fastest way to create generational wealth, sleep with as many partners as possible, climb to the highest managerial position, secure as much funding for startups as possible in the shortest time, run multiple benders, consume as many drugs as possible when possible, and follow podcasts which give the status of intelligence without developing the engine for cognitive endurance.
In reality, we need to slow down.
There’s one writer whose works have the heavy punch of Mike Tyson relative to the fast and sleek movement of Donnie Yen. Whenever I read the articles by Patrick Muindi, my brain generally slows down. I don’t know how it does, but it does. It’s my brain. Trust me when I tell you.
My current read, The Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega, has the same effect. Interestingly, the book talks about everything we currently experience in this fast-paced world, although he paints this picture by slowing my pace sentence by sentence.
Now that AI promises productivity, hopefully, magnitudes more, slowing down would only feel like a disadvantage when in reality, it allows you to see the forest for the trees.
Slow down.
Listen to the voice of Bob Marley reincarnated. This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube