Don’t speedrun your potential
Pawel Halicki
The driver’s seat gives him a soft buzz. Ready for the scenic part, he blinks awake and shakes off the nap. Their transport glides in lane, locking speed to the flow.
- Argh.
When a groan erupts from the back seat, his partner zooms the rear-view feed. Their daughter frantically taps the rear door glass.
- You woke up your brother. What’s up?
- It’s stuck. My game froze, and now my window won’t switch to display mode.
- It’s not frozen. We’re on a wonder lane. Tourism board rules here: auto flow and no overlays, so everyone can fully take in the view. Hold on, it’s worth it.
- Easy for you to say. You’re not in the middle of a competition.
He joins the exchange, throwing in a comforting smile.
- Listen, don’t rush your ideas. Tools can make you faster, but they can’t make you better. When you love doing something, you need a room to play, to be messy, to get lost inside your idea… It takes time.
- And requires breaks.
Their daughter grunts.
- Hmm…
- You know, I try to keep one rule with technology.
- Which is…?
- Don’t speedrun your potential. Automate what you don’t want to do, but never let the machines do what you love. Skip the cutscenes, but don’t skip the part where you get good. Okay, everyone, we’re almost there.
Their son giggles.
- Ten, nine, eight… That’s so funny.
At the set speed, lane markers sync with the car’s audio, and a countdown rolls through the cabin. The kids look at each other and grin.
- Three, two, one…
The tunnel spits them out without warning. Golden hour light floods the interior. The valley opens below them, and the mountains take up the whole windshield. A collective gasp of wonder fills the car. It’s the kind of view that steals your words, like trying to describe a new colour.
- Do you miss your overlay now?
She goes quiet for a beat, eyes still on the valley.
- No... but I’d want to choose when to look. Wait a moment, this tourism board basically patched the highway with forced cutscenes.
- Can we restart that moment? I want to gasp again.
- Me too!
They share a smile up front.
- See? That’s the right instinct.
- Okay… we’re streamtracking anyway. One courtesy replay remaining.
- But I still want my game back.
- You’ll get it back. You can restart a build. You can’t restart a moment.
The windows dim as the transport blanks overlays, smoothly rolling the view back into the tunnel.
- This lane is unfair.
Memories to build from this future:
Go back to a moment when you caught yourself in the middle of doing something you love, and your hands already knew the next thing to do. You weren't thinking. You were just doing. Somewhere in the years of being bad at it, then only okay, the thing had quietly entered your body.
Now, stay with what that slowness built:
Think back to the time of day you stopped speedrunning your routine and stayed with the part of your work you wanted to get good at.
What did you finally leave un-automated once you noticed the shortcut was thinning the skill you cared about?
How did the slower version of the work change what "getting good" actually felt like?
Which part of your day did you quietly protect from auto-flow once pace started costing you depth?
Try to recall the project where your team could have put the whole thing on auto-flow and chose to stay hands-on for the part that mattered.
What was the part the team refused to hand to the tools, even though it would have been faster?
How did staying in the slow stretch change what the finished work felt like?
Which skill sharpened only because the team chose not to skip the cutscenes on it?
Go back to a regular quarter after your organisation drew its own line between what the machines do and what people still do themselves.
What did the line reveal about where machines helped people grow and where they quietly held them back?
How did resistance shift once the slow stretches produced what the shortcuts never could?
Where did the protected parts of the work end up mattering more than the fast ones?
Before we close this one.
If you had a clear rule about what to hand over to the tools and what to keep for yourself, what in your week right now would need to shift?
What would you try keeping for yourself first? And does anything from this one connect to patterns you've noticed in other sessions?