Like 96% of metaphors you’ll find in the business world, the concept of fire and advance loosely derives from a military tactic. Troops lay down cover fire to suppress the enemy while others move forward. Apply the concept (but not bullets) to your projects and tasks.
When you can accomplish a task in half the time it takes someone else, you save time while seizing more territory. The more you do, the more you can get done.
Speed is a virtue for almost all low-risk tasks. It’s also a self-reinforcing trait. A rapid completion cycle pushes you to learn by doing, screw up productively, and gain ground while others are hypothesizing. The faster you work, the faster you learn, the more you can do, and so on. Efficiency builds momentum, and that momentum makes even bigger things possible.
Moving fast rewires how you think about the world. Perceived costs and barriers shrink. Speed helps you develop a bias for action rather than contemplation. It also trains you to find points of traction faster than others, whether those points of traction are workarounds, shortcuts, or completely new approaches. Incremental progress (years of practice) drives revelatory insights (the overnight successes).
Potential traps:
- If you move fast, your time may appear cheap. Just because you do it fast doesn’t mean you have to deliver it fast.
- Your workload will grow. As people perceive you as the fastest channel for throughput, they’ll send more your way. (“If you want it done fast, give it to a busy person.”) So be careful to rate-limit and delegate if your earning potential is capped.
“Doesn’t matter if you’re always right. It matters that you’re always moving.”
~Seth Godin, Linchpin (Book)
“You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.”
~Andrew Grove, High Output Management (Book)
