Speed tells you how fast you’re moving… it doesn’t tell you if you’re moving toward anything worth having.

And maybe that’s where things have been getting complicated over the past few days, as we hear the rhetoric ramping up around AI, the opportunity, and the future. This week on Thinking With Mitch Joel, I sat down with Eric Ries, the super-smart author of The Lean Startup (the book and the way to manage) and his new book, Incorruptible. Eric has spent years thinking about how great companies get built… and increasingly, what happens to them after they succeed. And too often, what happens next isn’t great. At one point in our conversation, he said something that has been rattling around in my head ever since…

We don’t know what “enough” means.

It reminded me of that famous story… at a party hosted by a billionaire hedge fund manager, writer Kurt Vonnegut pointed out to his friend Joseph Heller that their host made more money in a single day than Catch-22 had earned in its entire history. Heller responded that he had something their host would never have… enough. A simple exchange that perfectly captures the idea that ‘enough’ might have less to do with how much you accumulate… and more to do with knowing when more stops mattering. But, for a company…that’s a very strange idea… enough? We don’t build companies around enough… we build them around more. More customers… more revenue… more market share… more products… more efficiency… more productivity… more growth… more opportunities… more technology… and, as has always been the case, more speed.

The current AI situation may be our Vonnegut/Heller moment… there is a relentless pressure for more without any understanding of when it will be enough.

Ambition isn’t the problem… growth isn’t the problem… opportunity certainly isn’t the problem (there doesn’t seem to be enough AI to satisfy the demands of industry… while we’re simultaneously being told that even if development stopped today, the models we already have could transform much of our economy). Like you, I’ve spent my entire career chasing opportunities… building things… trying things… pushing into places where I had no idea what the outcome would be. The problem begins when more stops being an outcome and becomes the direction (look no further than the content and influencer space).

Once “more” becomes the direction… there is no destination.

Every moment of momentum becomes an argument for accelerating even harder. Eric talks about this through the lens of companies that were already successful… already profitable… already trusted by their customers… and yet the answer was still: more. Investors wanted more… boards wanted more… leaders wanted more. At what point does the pursuit of more begin consuming the very things that created the opportunity in the first place? Values become negotiable… trust becomes difficult to measure. Eric said something else that connects deeply to my thinking about speed… speed requires a long-term container.

I love that.

Because the opposite of speed isn’t purpose… it’s not quality… it’s not long-term thinking… it’s not safety. As a reminder… slow is the opposite of fast… everything else can coexist. You can move incredibly fast while being extraordinarily clear about where you’re going. You can experiment constantly while refusing to experiment with safety. You can pursue enormous opportunities while still knowing which opportunities aren’t for you.

This is what I mean when I say: direction + momentum > speed.

Direction is knowing where you’re going… momentum is knowing that what you’re doing is actually moving you there. Speed is simply how quickly it’s happening. It’s about knowing what you’re unwilling to trade to get there. That feels important right now because opportunity is becoming abundant. We can build faster… create faster… automate faster… scale faster. The challenge may no longer be whether we can go faster… clearly, we can. The harder question is whether we know what all of that speed is for… and whether we’ll recognize when more is finally enough… and worth it.

Because if we don’t decide what enough looks like… the relentless pressure for more will happily decide our direction for us.

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