Clocks v. Compasses

Moving But Not Moving

We all have this kind of urgency we inherit before we even understand what it’s costing us.

It doesn’t announce itself loudly. It starts as a soft ticking in the background, and we see ourselves rushing through deadlines and our childhood with the grown pre-mature adult life of career readiness, important but not essential events, and activities to buy time. All of it accelerates like we’re in a race but there is no finish line. I don’t remember exactly when I began running, but I did so before I checked for even where I was going.

I used to treat every minute like currency. I optimized everything: my calendar, my habits, my elevator pitch. I color-coded my Google Calendar down to the 15-minute block. I would sprint from gym practice to a coding session, barely breathing, then hop on a call about a youth technology initiative while eating dinner. I counted hours the way investors count ROI. If I wasn’t moving, I was wasting time. Stillness felt dangerous. Rest felt lazy. The pressure wasn’t just external, it was internalized. Sharpened. Weaponized.

Sometimes I’d crash and be in a rut for weeks, not getting anything done. In this society, I was a machine trained to be efficient, but I didn’t fully understand the purpose of it all. Why was I doing this task? Was I even made to do this? Who even am I? And eventually at some point in these questions, I finally asked: what if I was optimizing for the wrong thing?

I began to rebel, against myself and the greater environment around me. I knew I had to find a way out. I needed another tool.

My whole life, I’ve been drawn to speed. Cognitive speed. Fast answers to questions. Quick code. Quicker competitions. I loved acceleration. More importantly, I loved the adrenaline of being ahead. In middle school, I’d tear through books on AI and mathematics like they were comic books. In high school, I finished a whole Python course one weekend just because I didn’t want to be behind some imaginary leaderboard in my mind. The next weekend I’d complete all of general chemistry. It took me a month to finish basically all of Calculus I & II. I realized I could study, test, build, and lead all at once. And so I did. I wore my exhaustion like a badge of honor. I didn’t know where I was going, but I was going. Maybe this going was the only thing I had going for me.

But there’s a subtle danger in moving too fast: I forget to check where I’m going.

The realization hit during a late night in Cambridge. I’d just left a session where people were pitching brilliant things at lightning speed: a thousand different AI startups, gene editing, decentralized platforms, and something I forgot about digital twins. From the outside, it looked like everything I wanted. I remember being at a whiteboard surrounded by peers who could argue about the future of intelligence with razor-sharp clarity. We were all building something innovative, but I couldn’t shake the thought that it was just copy-pasting ambition, building fast and not building deep. What I described is how I feel about the current pace of AI.

Let me explain. Clocks measure how fast we’re going. Compasses tell us where we’re meant to go. They’re both tools. But they serve different masters. The world teaches us to worship clocks. Be first. Move fast. Ship now. Scale quickly. If we slow down, someone else will pass us. If we pause, the opportunity might vanish. Growing up, we were taught to believe that competition is a good thing. The belief that we should always be treating our time as utility.

And today, we are building technologies at faster speeds, competing across companies, countries, labs, and product cycles. But more and more, it’s starting to look like a race to the bottom, not the top. A race to release the next model faster. To integrate it wider. To capture more data. To automate more labor. No matter the downstream effects.

Every major player is afraid to slow down because someone else might not. So we accelerate, not because we’re aligned, but because we’re afraid. The clocks are winning. And if we’re not careful, we’ll build Ultron before we ever stop to ask if we wanted JARVIS. We’ll build AI that mimics human intelligence before we ever teach it to understand human values.

But some of the most powerful things I’ve built didn’t come from speed. They came from listening, to myself, to others, to what actually needed to be built. Clocks create urgency. Compasses demand honesty. And if I don’t stop to recalibrate, I risk becoming really good at chasing a goal that was never mine in the first place. In a world obsessed with speed, direction becomes a superpower, and this world needs people who can be manage clocks and compasses simultaneously.

The truth is, I don’t need to move fast every second. I need to move well. To create work that outlives the hype cycle. To make decisions that make sense to the deepest part of me. To know that every hour I spend isn’t just counted, it’s accounted for. And when in doubt, I check my compass. Because speed matters. But direction is everything. That’s why, sitting in an auditorium of the world’s brightest AI students, I resonated more than anyone with Andrew Ng’s quiet challenge: maybe we don’t need to “move fast and break things.” Maybe we need to move fast and build things we can responsibly live with.

Things we’re proud to hand off to the future. Not just progress. Aligned progress. Not just velocity. Vision. Because in the end, it’s not just about how fast I go. It’s about whether I’m becoming the kind of person and builder with the direction of the future we actually need.

We are all on this journey to figure out our compasses. For me, I think it is a mix of the right people, ideas, faith, community, and choices. I wish I could explain more, but my clock here is ultimately up.