Like many of us, I was a victim.

I would get the ‘sliding back on the treadmill’ feeling when I wasn't working.

Like if I stopped running, I'd quickly lose my footing and fall flat on my face.

Recently, I sat down to reflect on my entire work life so far. My work habits had been hurting other areas of my life and I asked myself the all-powerful question.

Why.

I had a lot to process— memories from my childhood, previous job roles, and past clients surfaced one after the other for hours— and beneath it all, one answer revealed itself.

Conditioning.

My need for quick money early in my career made me fear failure and give in to conditioning. I hated the thought of stagnation, mediocrity, and amounting to nothing much in life and started associating the word ‘slow’ with ‘stupid’ and ‘loser’. It led to a scarcity mindset that someone more dedicated than me (who puts in more hours) would replace me.

I never differentiated between my work and my life’s work.

I never left any room for mastery.

It’s not important whether my conditioning came from my parents, teachers, ex-bosses, or clients because I realized that I let myself be conditioned. And the alarming part is that this conditioning was based on a misconception of what work means.

More hours do not mean better work.

More hours don’t even mean more work.

But my conditioning made me believe the opposite of this.

I started speaking to many of my friends about it.

The ones in jobs would dismiss it as common sense but at the same time bitch about their company and boss without stopping. The business owners would endlessly talk about their heroic burnout stories.

That led me to think that the solution isn’t more work— it’s more meaningful work

For me, meaningful work is all about 2 things:

Insight and mastery.

Slowing down is the foundation for both.

Without slowing down, we risk tying our professional worth and sense of deserving to the number of hours we spend working. We risk disconnecting our personal and professional growth when they should be feeding off of each other. Our innate creativity will dip. Our work will become all about not being replaced.

I believe 90% of your future is inside your mind and its quality depends on the insight and mastery you develop in your work.

By slowing down, you start to reverse your negative conditioning around work

First, you need to understand that your brain is always working.

Here’s something I read about in Dan Koe’s The Art of Focus— Our conscious brain can handle 10-50 bits of information per second, whereas the unconscious brain can handle 11 million bits per second. The human brain works a lot more than we can possibly understand and a lot happens when we are away from our desks and screens.

Your brain is creating solutions for your business bottlenecks when you are:

• Sleeping
• Weight training
• Walking in nature
• or even taking a shower

The biggest idea you need to understand is that not working is part of working.

If this doesn’t make sense to you, nothing else I say will.

What my work as a writer can show you about developing insight

I believe there’s no such thing as a writer.

There are only thinkers.

Thinking is 90% of a writer’s value because value comes from insight, not words. Anyone with a decent education can learn the physical act of writing and editing in a few weeks. But it can take a lifetime to learn how to solve problems and share those solutions in a relatable way.

Doing this demands insight and that’s the writer’s real job.

So when I get paid for my writing, I’m actually getting paid for pattern recognition— the ability to ‘connect the dots’ between situations, people, and methods. If I don’t slow down, experience, test, and contemplate my ideas, they will become trees without roots.

They will die.

With AI and automation getting smarter in every industry, the future will belong to the writer who works from a place of insight and not information. The writer who simply does the writing will be quickly replaced.

At this point I’m forced to ask myself the all-important question— Is writing my job, career, or calling? I have a choice — I can either feel threatened that I’ll be replaced or I can see this situation as the opportunity of a lifetime to pursue my calling.

Just replace ‘writer’ with your designation and re-read this last bit. Is it true for you, too?

Developing insight starts with slowing down to think.

Tapping into your fundamental human desire for mastery

For context, I’ll give you my favorite analogy—

Becoming a skilled sushi chef takes a decade of rigorous training and artistry. An aspiring chef, or apprentice, starts at the bottom with banal tasks like cleaning and dishwashing. The importance of discipline and cleanliness is the only focus for the first one to three years.

The next step is to master sushi rice.

It involves a fine balance of cooking and seasoning and this stage can take up to three years to perfect. The chef then starts handling fish and other ingredients and advances from simpler tasks to complex techniques like slicing fish and making various types of sushi.

It may be eight years before the chef earns the right to create sushi independently.

After approximately a decade, there's a chance to achieve the prestigious title of ‘Itamae’ (skilled sushi chef)—but the learning doesn’t stop there. The Itamae continues to refine his or her craft.

Why I gave you this analogy

Apart from insight, I associate meaningful work with mastery.

Mass-producing sushi and selling it can feel empty. It’s the attached sense of mastery that makes us feel whole. A decade may seem excessive for some business goals but a big reason why people start their business in the first place is to follow their passion and feel whole.

Like sushi chefs, if we see our work as our craft, our business will not just be about what happens but about who we become, too.

It can be a lifelong pursuit that requires slowing down.

Two actions that can help you slow down and reinvent your work life

1. Intentionally create space for ‘thinking’

As Naval Ravikant suggests, block out one or two days a week when you don’t take any meetings, don’t work on tasks, and basically do nothing. If this step is too extreme to start with, try one evening.

We need to start somewhere.

2. Use stickies to rewire your brain

My wife literally stuck these on the wall in my home office.

Whenever I sit to write, I can look at it and remind myself that my subconscious will continue to solve my problems even if I shut my laptop and work out for an hour. This makes me feel good (and not guilty) about working out.

You can replace ‘workout’ and ‘meals’ with whichever activity you like.

Once you start trusting that not working is part of working, new solutions start to reveal themselves that make your efforts efficient and enjoyable.

You just need to keep your mind open.

Slowing down makes sense once you realize the 'shortcut' is actually the long cut in disguise

You don’t want to hustle for decades, get nowhere, and then start searching for meaning from scratch.

Working from a place of meaning is a powerful business and life skill.

We can develop it by allowing ourselves to slow down to the speed that meaning demands.

That's it for now.

Watch out for my next newsletter in which I'll walk you through a process to find insights in the ordinary everyday.

— Abhi

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