I Thought I Had to Rush Everything in Life
When I performed things slower, I did better.
I joined a new chess club in my city.
I had only recently started playing, but I had practiced constantly online.
Then I sat down at the club and lost.
And lost again.
I won one game out of six.
These people were destroying me.
So I went home and practiced everything I could before the next session.
I played more games.
Studied them afterwards.
Watched chess videos.
Then I returned the next week and still played badly.
By the end, I almost didn’t want to shake my opponent’s hand.
Not because they had done anything wrong.
I was embarrassed that I had tried so hard and still looked like a beginner.
It wasn’t just chess.
When I started driving...
When I started the gym...
Every new hobby followed the same script.
When I started learning to drive, I thought I would need five hours of lessons.
Every additional lesson felt like proof that I was learning too slowly.
It eventually took around twenty hours before I felt genuinely capable.
But by then, I couldn’t appreciate that I had learned to drive.
I could only think about how quickly I should have done it.
…
When I started going to the gym, I felt so weak.
I always checked after every session, if my weight had increased…
And I kept on wondering, why I can’t lift heavier today…
How long is this going to take?
I never let myself be a beginner.
…
Every time I started something new, I expected myself to learn like someone who had already been doing it for years.
I wasn’t comparing myself to where I started.
I was comparing myself to an imaginary future version of myself.
When I started my YouTube gaming channel, things felt painfully slow.
It took months before I had any meaningful traction…
…
Two years later, when I reached 100,000 subscribers, something changed.
I had built my identity around being ahead. Someone who learned quickly and succeeded young.
People kept telling me how successful I was.
How far ahead I was for my age.
And eventually, I started believing that success wasn’t merely something I had achieved.
It was who I was.
…
Whenever a video ranked tenth out of my last ten uploads, I didn’t see one underperforming video.
I saw evidence that I was losing whatever had made me successful.
Every video had to be first.
I no longer wanted to succeed.
I expected success.
When I was inexperienced, failure meant I was learning.
Once I believed I was experienced, failure felt like exposure.
The more successful I became, the less permission I gave myself to struggle.
The reality was simple.
One video underperformed.
I couldn’t play one piano passage yet.
My channel was still healthy.
But my mind added conclusions to every fact.
I should have known better.
I should be further ahead.
Maybe I was never as capable as I thought.
Life wasn’t telling me I was behind.
I was.
When I returned to Liebestraum, I made one rule.
I was no longer allowed to ask how quickly I could finish it.
I would slow every difficult passage down.
I would practice without turning every mistake into a judgment.
And I would try to enjoy being unable to play it yet.
Strangely, once I stopped trying to learn it quickly, I learned it faster than I expected.
The piece was never learned all at once.
It was built through hundreds of ordinary attempts that felt insignificant while I was making them.
…
I thought patience meant moving slowly.
It doesn’t.
…
Patience means acting without demanding immediate proof that the action is working.
Maybe I was never running out of time.
Maybe I just never trusted time to do its job.