When you are a salesperson, urgency becomes part of your personality. To drive business, you have to approach even the most mundane tasks with a sense that if it is not done today, the deal is not closing by the target date. If the email is not sent in the next hour, you will not get a response by next day and a meeting will not be booked by the following week. Any delay can have a butterfly effect. One of my managers had a rule for us: if you get an inbound request (someone reaching out to your company organically), you have to pause everything you are doing at the moment and call this person within 30 minutes. I remember one time I literally dropped the fork in the middle of my lunch to run upstairs to my office and write an email to a person requesting information about our product.
When I decided to quit education field and switch careers, I made a list of requirements for my next job: “fast pace” was placed at the top of the wish list. The repetitive cycle of teaching, the incremental but slow progress of academia clashed with my desire for novelty and upward movement. The only thing that changed every three months were students. Each semester – different faces, but same old books, similar essay topics and constant piles of papers to mark. Identical seminar rooms, unchanging salary, and fixed contract position. I craved the idea of having every day different from the previous one. I felt the urgency to have urgency in my career.
I remember my first deal in sales. Three months felt like one day. I lived in a dream state. My deal commanded my presence and urgency in everything. The planned vacation turned into pressing calls during family dinners. I would spend late nights working on presentations to be sent first thing in the morning. I do not remember the new restaurants we tried or sights we explored. But I felt high. The intensity of closing a big deal made me lose sleep. This was the first time I truly understood I had to be “ON” all the time. And I welcomed that sensation.
I did not win that deal. I was driving when I got a call. I did not pull over or changed my route, just turned off the music. Avicii’s “Feeling Good” did not feel good at all. The following weeks echoed with silence in my messages, empty calendar and unusual quieteness in my head. Nothing seemed urgent anymore. The emails could wait for a response. I do not really need to join the meetings. My manager is not asking for any updates. The world slowed down. And I retreated. I hid behind the papers, just not the students’ ones.
Ordinary life became too slow, predictable, bland. I used to love reading classics – Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Theodore Dreiser – getting lost in their ornate paragraphs. But it got harder and harder to appreciate the slow development of the story. I noticed my eyes skipping the descriptions, finding the words of action on the page. I could not sit with a book for more than 30 minutes. Surely, I was missing out on something bigger, more exciting. Books were, once, my main source of comfort.
I stopped writing as well. Even if I made an awkward attempt, I rushed to end the thought, the sentence mid-way. All I wanted to see was the end result – a finished product on a page. The thinking part, the coming up with an unlikely combination of words, the savouring of the moment as words appeared on page – I lost patience for that.
As I’m writing this blog, I am now teaching myself to slow down. Sometimes, I still fail. Like this blog post – I wanted to finish it by the third paragraph and jump to a moral lesson. But then I stopped. I reread it, rewrote a few times, spent a few days contemplating before hitting, “publish.” And all these hours of writing and editing did not feel like a waste.
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