My childhood of learning new things from my dad involved holding a flash light and getting yelled at because it wasn’t pointed in the right direction. Lucky for me, this seems to have been a common occurrence among my friends.

However, watching him at work was witnessing a master of his craft.

His intuition for how to problem solve, work and get the job done was uncanny. What would take me hours to do was a drop in the hat for him.

Therefore, I fixated on getting things done faster.

Yet, had I slowed down and learned to do it right, an overly-exaggerated slow way, that would have been the catalyst to pick up speed later.

This was a lesson to be re-learned as a professional magician.

The slower you practice the techniques (or “moves”), the more ingrained it becomes in your mind. In due course, the technique is mastered and runs smoothly, unnoticed by the audience.

It was also a lesson to be re-learned as a writer.

The secret to picking up speed was not learning how to type faster, or training myself to dictate (although both are helpful endeavours for many other areas), it was to slow down and get it right the first time. Spend more, consistent time, actually practicing until you hit a level of mastery of being able to write a story in a bookstore window and win awards without a single round of editing (that’s not me, yet).

It appears the faster we want to learn things, the slower we need to go.