I stalled – and all the education in the world couldn’t help
My digital twin now has a WhatsApp number.
You can click and send it a message now.
When I built this last month, I moved fast. I got the Twilio integration connected to a WhatsApp business number. Everything was smooth sailing for the first hour. I was in a vibe. Then came what seemed like the last and easiest part.
I had to register the number on WhatsApp.
I’d done this a million times. It was supposed to take a few seconds. Boom. “Code rejected. Try again later.” Huhn?
For the next two days, every attempt reset the process with the same error: “for security reasons try again in one hour.”
On the third day, I tried and noticed something I had missed.
The instructions read “add code to transfer from the other phone.”
I thought, “Wait, what other phone?”
Apparently, it was already set up. I just had to access it through the Meta portal.
Two days wasted because I was speeding through the instructions.
It was a reminder that rushing through stuff doesn’t necessarily get you to your goals faster.
When slowing down makes you faster
Speeding through life can actually slow you down.
With AI-assisted coding, I’m becoming used to accepting code changes without reading what’s been changed. I’ve fully given into the vibes now. That’s what I was doing that Saturday morning. Whenever I got a recommendation on what to build, I hardly read and accepted it.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Accept, accept, accept. I kept hitting the enter button.
Until I got to the instructions on how to integrate with another application.
If you’ve tried to build a software application, the challenge shows up when you want to get one application to speak to another one. I knew this but I was already in my auto-accept mode, impatiently eager to get to the outcome. The error I got on my phone drove me crazy because I couldn’t vibe-code myself out of the solution. If I had spent less than 30 seconds reading the actual 10-word instruction on Whatsapp, it would have saved me close to 12 hours.
I realized I was losing something in my sacrifice for speed.
I was losing patience.
Ironically, my lack of patience ended up slowing me down further.
I’ve seen this same thing with founders I work with.
Moving quickly. Building stuff and not verifying whether anyone wants it. Multiple meetings all day. Outsourcing all their thinking to fast-responding LLMs. Busy with everything but not slowing down to focus on the actual thing to get the business going: creating value for customers.
I watched one founder spend two weeks optimizing their outreach strategy before reaching out to a single customer.
In the mindset of being productive, we end up being busy without actually moving forward.
And your brain is not doing you any favors. It’s looking for the quickest shortcut to help you get to your goal. In reality, those shortcuts work against your growth.
While your brain is thinking about preservation and energy optimization, growth and creativity require exertion and inefficiency.
How many times have you rushed to respond to an email or Slack message without reading the last line: “but this is not a priority now?”
You scanned too quickly and zoomed off in the wrong direction.
Like J Cole said, “The good news is – you came a long way. The bad news is – you went the wrong way.”
Some might argue that with my Whatsapp agent, I still got there fast enough. That’s true. I moved a lot faster when compared to what was possible a few years ago.
But the process to get there was very frustrating. I spent unnecessary hours watching videos, reading reddit posts, asking AI, losing my train of thought, testing it out with no progress.
And the answer was right in front of me.
But I wasn’t aware enough to know when to switch my approach, to slow down.
The immediate dopamine hit for speed feels good in the moment until it doesn’t. The cost comes in the form of burnout or a long-term dragged-out dread when your business, career, and life goals stall.
For instance, if I had slowed down to read that instruction, I would have finished building the tool within minutes. I would have gotten more rest over the weekend. I wouldn’t have been so tired when Monday came around to do my number one activity: sales (talking to customers).
That’s a lesson I learned the following week. Could it have been avoided? Perhaps.
The more important question is this:
In a time of speed, how do you know when to slow down?
Paying the domain entrance fee
Here’s what I’m noticing on the practice ground: The most creative problem solvers know when to slow down, take a break, or straight-up shut the hell up to pay attention to the right signals.
They tune their signal-noise ratio to match the environment they’re in.
This requires a decent amount of humility to admit what you know and don’t know.
I’ve learned that if it’s something I’m encountering for the first time, that’s a good time to slow down to identify signals from noise.
Recently I was working on the outline of my next book. Along with my editor, we developed the timeline it would take to deliver it. I was comfortable with what I could deliver in that timeframe. Why? I’ve done it several times. I understand that domain more than the average.
With the WhatsApp agent integration, on the other hand, it was my first time. Whenever I’m doing something for the first time, I tend to underestimate what it takes.
I didn’t know what to expect or not.
The key is to be aware when you are going from one domain to another.
When you switch domains, it’s probably a good time to slow down and pay attention.
New domain = slow down.
Familiar domain = speed up.
Here’s how I’m experimenting with it and I’ll invite you to do the same.
Ask: “What about this is different from everything I’ve seen before?”
Then place your answer in one of the three domain switches that I can think of (there might be more).
Subject-matter (moving from one industry to a new one)
Situational (switching from being an employee to a business owner)
Tool-specific (transitioning from coding on Claude to integrating an API on WhatsApp)
That question forces you to slow down, because your brain wants to do the opposite. It wants to create a shortcut, and quickly find an analogy.
Breathe. Then take a full minute to recognize what’s in front of you.
Once you have this, pay attention to what could be different about the situation, subject, or tool, and focus your attention on that tiny sliver of activity. This is where the important signal for what you’re learning, in this moment, resides.
After you spend some time in this new domain with the new activity, if you find yourself stuck on the problem (struggling with it for up to 90 minutes), take a break (I wish I listened to my own advice here some more).
Go for a walk.
Your mind might need a reset to be able to see the problem from a different angle.
Closing Reflection:
When I glazed over that instruction, I thought I was saving time. I didn’t realize I was losing it.
I needed a better system to identify when to slow down, pay attention to the right signals, and discard the noise.
When you learn something new, there will always be some struggle.
The goal is to get better at learning more effectively. It’s hard to do that when you’re speeding through everything, and missing crucial details that could have saved you time. Slowing down might feel counterintuitive in our fast-paced world. But knowing exactly when to slow down is a life long skill that has never been more important to cultivate.
So this is the question I have for you: What part of your life can you slow down that will help you get to your goal faster?
Practice slowness in new domains.
Yours truly,
Nifemi
P.S. You can ask my agent on WhatsApp now how he’d go about slowing down. You might have to send it a few messages (a minute apart) before he responds. He’s a little sluggish.
