Episode 56: What if Hurry Won't Get You There Faster?
We often believe that hurrying will help us get more done or reach our goals faster. But what if hurry is actually slowing us down—leaving us drained, scattered, and missing the joy along the way? Tune in to explore the hidden cost of rushing through life, and the surprising alternative that can help you move forward with more clarity, peace, and even greater results.
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Full Transcript:
You're listening to the Think New Thoughts podcast with Emily Ricks, episode number 56. What if hurry won't get you there faster?
I'm Emily Ricks, and this is Think New Thoughts, a life coaching podcast to help you find more joy in your relationships. In each episode, I'll share a simple idea that will help you see things in a new way, so you can love God, your neighbor, and yourself more deeply than you ever have before. If you're ready to literally change your mind, I think you'll like it here.
Hello, my friend. Let's explore the idea of hurrying today.
What do you think about hurrying? Do you think it's good? That it helps you get more done? Helps you get places faster? Do you think it's stressful? Maybe you don't like the feeling of being in a rush? Do you eat fast? Do you drive fast? Do you multitask to try to get as many things done as you can? Or do you like to take more time and be unhurried? Also, when do you hurry in your life? And why? What are you trying to accomplish when you're in a hurry? I've been thinking about this in my own life a lot lately, just thinking about the idea of hurrying and really asking myself, where am I trying to get to? And what's the rush? Do I want this feeling of being rushed that I create with my thoughts? Does it serve me? Or do I actually want to create less of that in my life? Do you remember episode 36, your brain can build new roads, where I talked about even if you've been driving on a road for years and years, you can decide to forge a new path. You can bushwhack through the jungle and slowly over time by driving on a road over and over, you can train your brain to pave a new path. I'm kind of doing that right now with the idea of hurrying.
And I'm starting to pave a new trail around how I think about time and getting things done and questioning this feeling that is very familiar to me of moving really fast to get as much done as I can. So we're going to talk about three things today. Why we hurry, the cost of hurrying, and also an often overlooked alternative to hurrying that can bring more joy into your life.
So why do we hurry? I think the belief behind hurrying, the thought that creates the feeling that drives the action of running around as fast as you can is usually, I don't have enough time. Here's a quote that I love from an author named Lynn Twist. See if you can relate to this.
She says, for me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is, I didn't get enough sleep. The next one is, I don't have enough time. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don't have enough of.
Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we're already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn't get or didn't get done that day. That's her quote.
Do you ever feel like that? I've noticed for me that when I'm hurrying in my life, there's usually a feeling of inadequacy fueling it. I don't have enough time. I'm not getting enough done.
I'm not making enough progress. So usually I reach for hurry as a strategy to get things done faster and therefore get more done often in an attempt to counteract the feeling of inadequacy that I create when I believe the thought that I don't have enough time. So right now in my life, I'm choosing to be curious and fascinated with myself about this.
Like, Oh, that's interesting that I do that. That's interesting that I create the feeling of inadequacy by believing that I don't have enough time. And then I try to hurry to make up for that.
So here's a question I like to ask my clients that I ask myself sometimes too. Like, what does this belief say about you? That's positive and awesome. So this belief that I want to hurry because it will help me get more done.
It shows that I have a lot of things in my life that I want to do. A lot of things I'm passionate about that I want to create. It shows that I'm willing to put lots of effort into things.
And I like to grow and learn and contribute and be part of things. The downside of this belief, a way that it holds me back is that it creates a constant story of being behind that fuels the idea that I need to hurry and try to just get as much done as I can as fast as I can in the hopes of somehow catching up. So hurrying will get me more done.
Hurrying will get me there faster. Is it true? I think it can be true in the short term. Like if I have a meeting at the church that starts in 15 minutes and it takes eight minutes to drive there and I'm not quite done putting on my makeup, I do believe that a feeling of hurry can help me cut through the final decisions and pack up my purse without getting distracted so I can be on time to the meeting.
The feeling of hurry helps me not dawdle. It helps me not water the flowers or not start that conversation because I don't actually have time to do that and still be on time. But if being on time to the meeting is the ultimate goal, there are a lot of other ways I could achieve that without ever hurrying.
I could wake up earlier. I could lay things out the night before. And if I did that, I wouldn't need to hurry.
I could be on time to the meeting and also have space to breathe and think and listen to something lovely in the car while I'm driving. So this idea of hurrying will help me get more done? Like maybe, but if breathing and thinking and being calm is on my list of things to do, hurrying actually helps me get less done. Okay, so we hurry because we believe we don't have enough time and we want to get more done and it feels like if we hurry we'll be able to do more faster.
And of course there is some truth to this, but there's also a cost to hurrying that I think is important to factor in. As I've started to take a look at this concept of being in a hurry, I've discovered that I like listening to audiobooks and podcasts at a faster speed, usually two times speed, so I can get more in in a shorter time. That's a type of hurry that works for me.
It feels like a net positive. I like to set a timer for 10 minutes and tidy up my house as fast as I can before the timer beeps and then let that be enough until another time. This is a type of hurry that feels like a benefit overall.
It keeps me from getting bogged down in too many details. I'm good to fold laundry while I'm talking to my kids about their day and multitask to do two things at a time. But there are other kinds of hurry that I feel like are not beneficial to me.
Like hurrying to eat, hurrying to check emails, hurrying to try to accomplish more than actually fits in a day, hurrying to exercise so it won't take too much time. When lots of hurry piles up, I feel like hurry isn't all that it's cracked up to be. The promise that if I hurry, I'll get more done.
If I hurry, I'll get there faster. Sometimes it's not true. Sometimes hurrying drains me.
It wears me down and I actually end up less productive and less creative and less joyful because I'm rushing around. And the cost of all that hurrying is that in the rush, I lose clarity of what really matters and what I'm even trying to accomplish. When I'm exhausted from all that hurry, I don't see as clearly.
So if hurry robs me of clarity, it definitely does not help me get more done in the end. Do you see what I'm saying? So let's talk about the alternative to hurry. A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I celebrated our anniversary, 22 years.
And we decided to go up to the mountains and do something fun. There's a mountain pass that goes from Vail down to Frisco and it's about 16 miles. And there's a bike path and it's super fun to bike down the pass.
It's just downhill the whole way. We've done it several times with our kids. I have memories of doing it with a bike trailer, with a tag along bike, all sorts of different ages of our kids.
Anyway, we've done it a bunch of times. So we decided we wanted to try going up the pass. So we rented some e-bikes.
It kind of felt like cheating, but it was also super fun. We pedaled the whole time, but we also got lots of help from the bikes. There were three settings so we could get as much help as we decided we wanted.
And the more you pedal, the more help you get. So we just really enjoyed ourselves going up that mountain pass. And then we also came down.
We put in effort, we reached the destination, and also we never hurried. And we weren't exhausted when it was over. It was fascinating to me.
As I've thought about it since, I've thought how funny it would be if we had two versions of myself going up that mountain pass. Version one would be me on a regular bike, maybe with a deadline of time and 16 miles to bike uphill and determining the only way I can get to the top in that amount of time would be to hurry and work as hard as I possibly can to pedal as hard as I can for as long as I can and be really out of breath and exhausted making my way to the top. Version number two would be me on the e-bike, choosing to get some resource, some strength beyond my own, hopping on that e-bike and pedaling and putting forth effort, but also never hurrying the whole time.
And I've been thinking about this. Between version number one and version number two, if they started at the same time, which one would have gotten to the top first? My knee-jerk response is, well, whoever hurries gets there faster. Hurrying will help me get there faster.
But with the e-bike in the equation, version number one of me hurrying, pedaling as hard as I can, I don't know if I even would have made it all the way to the top. I probably would have passed out like three-fourths of the way up if I was hurrying, pushing, pushing to get there as fast as I could. I think leaving at the same time, the e-bike version of me would have gotten to the top faster than the hurrying version of me.
So what if hurrying won't get you there faster? My brain by default thinks the solution to every problem is me working harder, doing more, spending more time and more energy on something until we get through the obstacle. And that's positive and awesome that I'm willing to work hard, that I have grit and determination, and I take responsibility for wanting to create results in my life. But the downside is I can really overexert myself hurrying up the mountain, trying to do it all myself and getting really tired, but pedaling harder and harder because I just know I want to get to the top of that mountain.
And I know some of you who I've coached who are also like this. So what is a mountain you really want to get to the top of? One way to achieve your aim is that you can do more and pedal harder and hurry as fast as you can and work as hard as you possibly can to get to the top. What if you could get there without having to hurry? What if you decided that you're for sure getting up that mountain, but you're not going to hurry to do it? What if you decide you're not going to pass out with exhaustion? You're going to figure out a way to do it that's reasonable and maybe even kind of fun.
If you weren't hurrying, what would you be able to see that you can't see when you're in a rush? Here's what I'm discovering. As I start to notice when I feel rushed and start to question the thoughts that create that feeling and maybe push back on them a little bit, my perspective widens and I start to see additional resources besides just me pedaling my guts out, wearing myself out. That's not the only resource available to me.
I think I shared this on a previous episode, but I love the story of the guy who's trying to saw down a tree and he's getting really worn out, just cutting, cutting away. And someone comes up to him and says, Oh, it looks like your saw is getting dull. If you sharpen it, it'll be easier to cut down that tree.
And he's like, I don't have time to sharpen my saw. So he just keeps working, working, trying to saw down the tree with a dull saw. And this is an example of when hurrying doesn't help.
Hurrying is not going to help him get more done. And the resource of a saw sharpener would be really helpful to consider rather than just pushing harder to hurry and get more done. So here's just a little warning I'd like to throw out there.
Hurry always tries to present itself as the solution. It whispers, if you just go faster, push harder, do more, you'll finally catch up. You'll finally get there.
But you don't have to automatically believe that voice. You can pause and ask, wait, what if hurry isn't the answer here? What if hurrying is actually holding me back from where I really want to go and keeping me from enjoying the path to get there? Here's what I believe. You can achieve your goals without being in a constant rush.
In fact, taking time to rest, to think clearly, to prioritize what really matters, to pray, often gets you further in the long run than frantic peddling ever could. Slowing down can create space for wisdom, for creativity, for better decisions. And most importantly, you don't have to do it all in your own strength.
Asking for help from God, from the people around you, from resources outside yourself, often moves you forward a lot faster than white knuckling your way uphill. It's like choosing the e-bike over a traditional gear bike. You're still peddling.
You're still putting in effort, but you're no longer exhausting yourself in the name of speed. So depending on what you're working on, maybe it's time to hire someone to help you. Maybe you could trade resources with someone who has strengths that you don't have.
Maybe you could learn something really helpful from someone who's been there. I think there are so many ways to do this in life. They're not cheating.
They just make the journey a lot more fun. What's the e-bike for you? What's the untapped resource that would make it so much more doable and so much more fun to reach the top of the mountain? The next time you feel that pull to hurry, I want you to remember, hurry is not the only option. And you can move forward with clarity, with intention, and with help beyond your own.
And you might just find that when you stop hurrying and tap into the resources that are available to you, you have more fun, get more done, and maybe even get there faster than you ever imagined you could. Thanks for joining me today. I'll talk to you next week.
