The early Dubai years at IBM started with an engineering background and zero real sales experience. The instinct, trying to catch up fast, was to rush through the fundamentals: memorize a pitch, learn a few objection-handling scripts, get to actual client conversations as quickly as possible. Speed felt like skipping the boring parts.
The first few deals moved fast and then stalled, repeatedly, at the same kind of point: a client’s real constraint, the actual reason they weren’t ready to buy, had never been properly understood, because the early conversations had leaned on a memorized pitch instead of real diagnosis. Each stalled deal meant going back to the beginning, re-qualifying, restarting a relationship that had started on the wrong foundation. What had looked like speed turned into a lot of redone work.
Learning something faster rarely comes from moving faster through the material. It comes from needing fewer redos, and the number of redos is set almost entirely by whether the fundamentals were actually understood the first time, not skimmed past to get to the more interesting parts. The paradox is real: the fastest route usually requires deliberately slowing down at the exact points that feel most tempting to rush through.
Key Takeaways
- Learning faster comes from needing fewer redos, not from moving faster through the material.
- Skimming the fundamentals to get to the interesting parts usually produces more redone work later, not less.
- The parts of learning that feel most tempting to rush past are usually the ones that determine how many redos come later.
- Slowing down at the start, measured across the whole process including every redo avoided, is often the actually faster route.
- A repeated type of mistake further into a process is usually a sign the real problem sits earlier, at a fundamental that got skimmed.
Where to actually slow down
Once the approach changed, so did the results. Client conversations started with real, slow, specific questions about their actual situation, before any pitch happened at all. It felt slower in the moment. It wasn’t, once the whole cycle is counted: fewer deals collapsed halfway through, fewer relationships had to be rebuilt from a bad first impression, fewer weeks spent recovering from a rushed start.
The general pattern holds well beyond sales. The parts of learning something new that feel most tempting to rush past, the basic definitions, the first few repetitions, the boring setup, are usually the exact parts that determine how many redos come later. Speeding through them doesn’t save time. It borrows it, at a worse rate, from later.
FAQ
Doesn’t slowing down contradict the goal of learning faster?
Only if speed is measured by the first pass through the material. Measured across the whole process, including every redo a shaky foundation causes, slowing down at the start is usually the faster route, not the slower one.
How do you know if you’re rushing the fundamentals?
A reliable sign: if the same type of mistake keeps happening a few steps further into the process, the actual problem is usually earlier than where the mistake shows up, at a fundamental that got skimmed rather than understood.
How much time should you spend on fundamentals before moving on?
Enough that you could explain them without hesitating, not a fixed number of hours. If a fundamental still feels shaky when you try to apply it, that’s the signal to stay a little longer, not the clock.
