#95: The Speed culture

Eyyyyy good news!

Movie franchise: Fast and Furious

We are living in a Speed culture.

With every new swipe, we're presented with a new tweet or video.

With 5G, we can download a whole season on Netflix within minutes.

Each year, we celebrate a new wave of Forbes 30 under 30. Videos about successful people who made X millions before 20 are getting millions of likes and shares.

Everything is moving and updating so fast now we are no longer able to catch up, hence the rise of all types of reviewers: books, tech gadgets, movie summaries...

People are rushing to NFT or some random Crypto coins for some quick bucks, instead of consistently buying SP500 stocks each month.

It’s hard to tell which one came first: We are like this because the fast and successful people above are calling us to follow suit, or because secretly we think we are an outlier and their existence just proves that 1 in a million isn't that small?

Regardless, one thing is certain: the Speed culture makes us feel good.

It’s like riding a bike, the faster you are, the more thrilling the experience. Each swipe hits us with a very small dose of dopamine, but still big enough to force us to swipe to the next piece of content. The more content we consume, especially the Excel, Philosophy, Workout, and Life-hack content on Tiktok, the more knowledgeable we think we are. We feel good because we’re still learning during our rest time.

However, people are so obsessed with Speed (velocity) that they are ignoring the other factor of momentum: Mass.

Image source: Haatch.com

Mass is an accumulation, a compound, or a stack of things. Skills, knowledge, blog posts, and trees are all things that, if accumulated enough, will create a Mass.

In real life, such "masses" are often known as: work titles (the higher-ranked you are, the more skills and knowledge you have), novels, and jungles.

Unlike Speed, Mass takes time to grow. You cannot master a skill after one course, write a novel in one night, or grow a jungle in a few weeks.

Also, Mass is rarely linear: progress equals a lot of trial and error, and often such experience will transform the original subject into something completely unimaginable.

Mass is like a spiral of growth. You go in a circle, but outward. It feels very repetitive and sometimes utterly boring (though, there’s much more beyond that). But since we’re going outward, we’re still growing.

I firmly believe that Mass is also a powerful, if not more, factor that contributes to your progress and success.

The more massive something becomes, the more it attracts other bodies into its orbit (look at Earth, Sun, and Moon). Growth becomes effortless. Once you got your Mass moving, it will have significantly higher momentum than a smaller mass. It’s almost unstoppable. Think of a huge truck trying to stop on a highway.

We might know the very first flower in our yard, but even if we continue to plant that exact same flower, in the end, when our yard becomes a whole garden, it's a mini ecosystem of fauna and flora that attracts all types of lives: bees, butterflies, worms, and other wild plants.

Last week I talked to a Facebook influencer about the "sharing" behavior of people on the Internet. We both agreed that people are more likely to share about a piece of work/content when the author's name is established a.k.a they have a critical mass of work that proves they know what they are doing.

In other words, people don't just share a piece of work, they share a representation of a trusted Mass of work. And thanks to Speed, people don't usually have enough time to verify if the work produced is right or wrong. Just the mere fact that one human is committed enough to, say, produce 3-year worth of content on a blog about productivity, is enough to get that person the title “productivity guru”.

Yes, I'm talking about myself (though I hate it when people call me guru).

I am far from a popular blogger whose income from the blog can cover my living expenses. But I'm proud to say that by simply writing for the past three years, I can attract around 400+ new subscribers every month, and my blog, though not having new posts for half a year, still gets 100-120 new readers every day. I’ve got brand offerings and was invited to co-teach one of (if not) the best writing classes in Vietnam. All thanks to working on my Mass - consistent writing.

My newsletter consistently gets 400+ new subscribers every month. The only thing I do is write and write.

Don’t get me wrong, before all of this, my first year was miserable. Around 50-ish same people were reading my blog and I got zero feedback/response from it. It was like shooting in the dark, I didn’t know if my content hit anyone.

. . .

Mass and Speed are both great strategies for success. You don't have to follow both, as you can clearly see the stark contrast between the two.

If you're working on your Mass, don't be sad if it is slow. It needs to be slow to be a Mass. Patterns only emerge when there is enough connection between random dots.

If you hate yourself for taking 2 months to finish a book, know that you are giving every cell in your brain an amazing opportunity for spaced repetition and real-life application.

If you feel good after learning some Excel hacks on Tiktok, know that easy comes easy goes. It will not improve your data analysis skills and even many such hacks will certainly not get you your next promotion.

Things that decelerate us in this era of speed like books, arts, or poetries, are secretly transforming the trees inside us to become a jungle. It's hard to notice, and it will always be, but in the end, it will still get us there. It might be a different there of Speed, but surely an equally rewarding one.

Don’t give up on your Mass.

Happy birthday to me! 🥳

I'm turning into an age that the "early 20s" will not apply to me anymore. And you know what?

The closer I am to number 30, the more rushed I feel. 30 in Vietnam is mystically chosen as the age of success: You should be married, and have a house, and a car (or at least, bikes) by then.

While I'm working on my Mass, the Speed culture sometimes sneaks behind me and stabs me in the conscience. I think the reason for this is all the components of success I listed above are none of the things I'm working towards, lol.

Annnnyyyy way, to celebrate this birthday, I want to share with you a good news:

From April onward, I will make all newsletters 100% free to read. You can access both existing and future posts without having to pay a dime.

I have thought long and hard about this. This decision helps me provide the best quality content for you while still giving me enough freedom to enjoy my life.

I will still write and publish occasionally, but not 4 posts per month like before. The content and format will be more diverse and in line with where my curiosity is.

I also want to take this chance to thank many of you who have been reading this newsletter since my birthday 3 years ago. Please know that by simply allowing my letter to arrive in your inbox every week, you’re already making someone’s life so much more meaningful.

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Another thanks for reading this week’s newsletter. If anything in this newsletter has provoked your thoughts, I‘d love to hear them - it’s the best reward for my writing journey.

As always, I wish you a relaxing Sunday and a productive week ahead.

Yours,
Tuan Mon

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Many One Percents newsletter is my weekly curation of Internet gems, mostly about technology, productivity and product management. If you want to support me, you can either subscribe to this newsletter, or donate via these channels: Momo | Paypal | Vietcombank