double speed.

I walked home from work today, and I listened to podcasts at double speed.

There’s something more engaging about hearing someone’s words at such a pace that I don’t get bored. That I don’t need to ask myself to focus. That the listening itself becomes enough of a task that I find myself focusing harder on every word.

The biggest problem I have in life is that I constantly feel like things are taking too long. It’s not that I think I deserve to get things faster, or that I want them to be over - I just want to get to the part where we’ve finished the explaining, and we can actually have a conversation about things.

Sometimes I wish I could have conversations at double speed.

Just get things up to the pace where I’m fully engaged, where I’m using as much of my conscious mind as I can to try to internalize, where I don’t need to put effort towards focus, where I don’t need to do anything put keep up, gleefully and rewarded in the understanding.

Something about my brain is better suited to sprints, even sustained ones, than it is to marathons.

You can’t ask people to speed up. Trying to skip ahead makes them feel unappreciated, or dismissed, or as tough I don’t care about what they have to say.

So I spend a lot of time trying very hard not to lose focus. Waiting until people are ready to share an idea with me, rather than backstory and explanation they feel is necessary.

This is definitely one of my biggest character flaws. It’s also probably the reason I’m good at what I do.

@8 months ago with 2 notes
#listening #conversation #distraction #flaws #processing speed