A metallic clang. The sudden, jarring stop. My coffee, half-way to my lips, sloshed precariously close to the brim. Not the first time. The building, supposedly cutting-edge, had a habit of these momentary arrests, like a thought catching in the throat. I pressed the ‘door open’ button, then ‘call,’ then ‘door open’ again, a pointless ritual I’d performed perhaps 16 times in the last 6 months. It was a familiar frustration, a tiny snag in the meticulously planned fabric of a workday, yet it always felt like a betrayal. We build these towering monuments to frictionless living, promising swift ascent and effortless navigation, only to find ourselves suspended between floors, a captive audience to our own impatience. What an astonishing 6-second glimpse into the illusion of control.

My breath hitched. The stale air in the small metal box felt suddenly heavier, thicker. There was a faint, almost imperceptible groan from the mechanics above, then silence, save for the hum of the emergency light. My stomach did a nervous flip. That familiar knot of frustration tightened in my chest. It wasn’t just the delay, though that was part of it. It was the absolute helplessness, the sudden, brutal reminder that despite all our smart tech and meticulously engineered schedules, we are utterly reliant on systems we neither control nor fully understand. A system designed for maximum throughput, for moving 26 bodies per minute, had failed in the most basic way, leaving me, and 6 other unfortunate souls, suspended in a void. This wasn’t an anomaly; it was a symptom of a deeper societal malaise. We’re taught, from childhood, that efficiency is king. Time is money. Optimize, streamline, accelerate. And for a long time, I bought into it. Hook, line, and sinker. I devoured books on productivity, implemented agile methodologies in my own projects, even tried to ‘optimize’ my grocery shopping route down to the last 6 steps. I believed that every wasted second was a personal failure, every delay a flaw in my planning. This relentless pursuit, I see now, wasn’t just misguided; it was actively detrimental. It fosters a brittle kind of existence, where any deviation from the perfect, pre-ordained path feels like a catastrophe. It’s like designing a rocket ship that can reach Mars in 6 hours, but if one tiny sensor fails, the whole mission explodes. There’s no buffer, no give, no room for the messy, unpredictable realities of human life or complex systems.

The Chimney Inspector’s Wisdom

This leads me to people like Ahmed H., a chimney inspector I once hired. His existence seemed to operate on a different temporal plane. He moved with a deliberation that bordered on reverence, his every action a testament to craftsmanship and patience. When he spoke of flue liners and creosote build-up, it wasn’t technical jargon but a kind of poetry, revealing the hidden arteries of a home, a system often as complex and unforgiving as the elevator shaft I’d just been stuck in.

I remember watching him, his face smudged with soot, his tools laid out in a precise, almost ritualistic order. He explained that a particular job, due to the age of the chimney and the intricate brickwork, would take not 2 hours, but at least 6, maybe 16, hours spread over several days. He refused to rush, to cut corners, even when I, in my well-meaning but misguided enthusiasm for “getting things done,” tried to push for a quicker turnaround. My own efficiency programming kicked in, a subtle nudge to ask: ‘Can’t we just get this done? There must be a faster way.’

But Ahmed was immovable. “This isn’t about speed,” he’d said, wiping a gloved hand across his brow, leaving a black streak. His eyes, though tired, held a deep conviction. “This is about knowing the system, understanding its breath, feeling its pulses. You cannot rush a building, just as you cannot rush the sky.” He found a crack, barely a 6-millimeter hairline fracture, obscured by decades of soot, that a less meticulous or more hurried person would have missed, a flaw that could have led to carbon monoxide poisoning. My modern, efficient HVAC system, with all its smart sensors and remote diagnostics, would never have flagged it; it only reported what its sensors *could* see, not what lay hidden behind decades of brick and mortar and slow decay. He saved us what could have been a $6,000 problem, possibly worse, a true testament to the value of human experience and deliberate action over algorithms and accelerated timelines. He understood that true value lies not in acceleration, but in thoroughness, in the unhurried excavation of truth that only experience, not algorithms, can provide. His wisdom, like the old building materials he worked with, had a weight and permanence that ephemeral digital solutions often lack. He understood that a building, much like a life, is a layered thing, with 6 dimensions of hidden complexity, not a flat, optimized surface.

The Cost of Speed

Ahmed’s approach forced me to confront a glaring contradiction in my own thinking, a mistake I’d replicated countless times in my professional life. For years, I preached the gospel of ‘lean’ operations, of minimal viable products, of doing *just enough* to get by, then iterating. I recall a project, oh, about 6 years back, where I pushed a team to launch a beta product far too early, convinced that the market demanded speed above all else. We cut testing phases, skimped on documentation, and even sidelined a few experienced engineers who warned against the rapid pace. The launch was, technically, on time. The celebratory champagne tasted like ashes. The product was riddled with bugs, user feedback was overwhelmingly negative, and the subsequent effort to fix everything cost us triple the initial savings, not to mention a significant chunk of our customer base and reputation. My efficiency-first approach created an illusion of progress that masked a colossal failure in judgment. The problem wasn’t the idea itself, but the almost pathological fear of ‘wasting’ time, of not being perceived as dynamic and fast-moving, a fear instilled by a culture that equates speed with progress. It was a mistake I learned from, painfully, over the course of the next 26 months spent rebuilding trust, often with 6-hour daily stand-ups designed to claw back every lost millisecond.

This societal obsession with ‘doing more with less,’ with extracting every last drop of measurable output, creates a strange form of collective anxiety. We are perpetually in motion, yet often feel we are getting nowhere meaningful. It’s like furiously paddling a small boat in an endless ocean, convinced that if we just paddle harder, faster, we will somehow find land, never pausing to look up and consult the stars or feel the direction of the wind.

We’re fed a diet of instant gratification, where everything is supposed to load in under a second, where every problem has a quick app-based solution. We chase after these fleeting highs, whether it’s through endless scrolling or the immediate feedback loop of an online challenge. Perhaps it’s this conditioning that makes us so impatient with anything that requires genuine time and sustained effort. It’s a craving for dopamine hits, for the immediate gratification of a ‘win’ or a ‘like’ or a ‘completed’ task, regardless of its actual substance. We’ve been trained to expect that effort should immediately yield results, that every engagement should be immediately rewarding, and if it’s not, we simply swipe away or close the tab, seeking the next ephemeral thrill. It’s almost like we’re constantly searching for the next hibaazi game to distract us, rather than engaging with the slow, often frustrating, but ultimately more rewarding realities of building or repairing something meaningful. Our collective consciousness seems to have internalized the idea that anything taking more than a few moments is inherently inefficient, a flaw to be eradicated, rather than a necessary part of deep work or authentic connection. Think about it: how many of us have abandoned a hobby because it required more than 6 minutes of dedicated learning before we felt proficient? Or ended a conversation because it wasn’t moving at the expected rapid-fire pace? This constant pursuit of the instantly gratifying, the frictionless experience, leaves us with a shallow engagement with the world. We become adept at surface-level interactions, but lose the capacity for the kind of sustained, uncomfortable inquiry that leads to true understanding or innovation. We’re excellent at consuming, but poor at creating, because creation is inherently messy, inherently inefficient, demanding multiple drafts, numerous mistakes, and hours of unglamorous struggle. It demands a willingness to wait, to fail, to try again 106 times if necessary.

Resilience Over Speed

This isn’t to say that all speed is bad, or that optimization has no place. Of course not. A truly efficient system, one that serves human needs, integrates well-being, and withstands unexpected shocks, is a marvel. But the *fetishization* of speed, the insistence that it is the sole metric of progress, is where we falter. It leads to systems that are incredibly efficient at doing exactly one thing, but utterly incapable of adapting when the unpredictable happens. When the single, hyper-optimized supply chain breaks down because of a 6-day disruption at a single port, the entire global market reels. When a specialized AI system encounters a novel problem outside its narrow programming, it freezes, unable to improvise. Resilience, true resilience, isn’t about being fast; it’s about being robust, adaptable, and having redundant systems – human or mechanical – that can kick in when the primary one falters. It’s about building in the ‘inefficiencies’ that serve as safety nets and springboards for innovation. A robust system often has 6 layers of protection, not one. It’s about acknowledging that sometimes, the longest way around is the shortest way home, because it builds understanding, character, and durable solutions. We need to relearn the value of slack, of margins of error, of the ‘waste’ that turns out to be crucial redundancy. The building with 6 elevators that all work some of the time is more resilient than the one with 1 hyper-efficient elevator that breaks completely and leaves 6 floors of people stranded.

Consider the natural world. It operates on cycles, on seasons, on processes that unfold over vast stretches of time, each one inherently ‘inefficient’ by human corporate standards, yet perfectly effective for survival and flourishing. A tree doesn’t grow in 6 weeks; a mountain doesn’t form in 6 years. The evolution of a species takes 6 million years, not a brisk quarter. There’s a profound wisdom in the slow, the emergent, the gradual accumulation of experience and substance, a deliberate pacing that our modern lives seem determined to override. And yet, we constantly try to impose our artificial deadlines, our accelerated expectations, onto everything. We expect instant solutions to complex societal problems that have been compounding for centuries. We diagnose intricate emotional landscapes in 6-minute therapy sessions, hoping for a quick fix that a 6-year therapeutic journey might still find challenging. We try to compress decades of learning into 6-month crash courses, then wonder why the knowledge feels superficial and unrooted. It’s a fool’s errand, leaving us perpetually exhausted and fundamentally unsatisfied, feeling like we’re running a race with no finish line, only ever-accelerating starting guns. We’ve forgotten how to simply *be* in the moment, rather than optimize it, to engage with the world on its own terms, rather than constantly bending it to our will for maximum perceived output.

Embracing Friction

What Ahmed H. showed me, and what my elevator experiences constantly remind me, is that the *friction* we encounter is often where the real learning and real value lie. The unexpected halt forces us to look around, to notice details we otherwise would have rushed past, to appreciate the simple fact of gravity, the reassuring groan of functioning machinery, or the surprising calm of a shared inconvenience with 6 strangers. The difficult, time-consuming repair work reveals the underlying structure, the vulnerabilities, and the strengths in a way that smooth operation never could. The discomfort of waiting, or of engaging in a process that feels slow, gives us space to think, to reflect, to allow new connections to form. It gives us a chance to truly understand a problem from 360 degrees, not just the angle our optimized software shows us. It provides moments for quiet observation, for the kind of subtle intuition that only germinates in the fertile ground of unhurried attention. It’s in these moments, ironically, that true efficiency emerges – the efficiency of clarity, of understanding, of durable solutions that don’t need constant patching up.

What if we purposefully built in buffers, allowed for detours, and valued deliberation over acceleration? What if, instead of chastising ourselves for not being constantly productive, we allowed for moments of quiet, unproductive contemplation? What if we understood that some of the most profound insights, the deepest connections, the most lasting creations, don’t emerge from a sprint but from a meandering journey, often punctuated by unexpected stops and detours? It might just be that the path to a truly rich and resilient life isn’t paved with perfectly optimized shortcuts, but with the winding roads and the occasional, necessary stoppages that allow us to actually experience the landscape around us, to feel the sun on our faces, to notice the intricate patterns in a forgotten brick wall. Perhaps the true mastery, the kind that lasts for 46 years and beyond, isn’t in eliminating all friction, but in learning to dance with it, to find the rhythm in its resistance, and to understand that sometimes, standing still for 6 minutes is the most productive thing you can do.