Conquer Speed - Full Guide
Napoleon walked fast. Like, absurdly fast.
There’s a famous scene during a tour with foreign ambassadors where he walked at such a pace that the entire diplomatic entourage was practically jogging behind him, out of breath, trying to keep up.
He wasn’t in a hurry to get somewhere specific. That was just how he moved.
He also ate fast, meals finished in minutes. He treated eating as an interruption, something to get through so he could get back to work.
Elon Musk is the same way, he’s said he wishes he didn’t need to eat at all so he could spend that time on more interesting things.
Employees report that Elon even pisses fast. He forces it to finish quicker so he can get back to whatever he was doing.
These guys didn’t “implement speed” as a strategy at some point in their careers.
They found wasting time physically uncomfortable, at the level of bodily function.
Musk loves a strategy game called Polytopia. One of the lessons he draws from it: “Optimize every turn. In the game, you have 30 turns. It’s the same in life, we have a limited amount of turns, and if you let a few of them slide, we will never get to Mars.”
A turn you don’t use is gone forever. You can’t bank them, you can’t save them for later. They just disappear.
Now combine that with having goals that are actually big. Not “I’d like to make a bit more money” big, but goals that genuinely scare you, goals that would take everything you have.
When your goals are that size and your turns are that limited, wasting them starts to feel insane. Every slow day, every week spent deliberating, every month of “I’ll get to it eventually” is a piece of your life you burned for nothing.
Napoleon and Musk’s speed doesn’t comes from some productivity system or a discipline hack, but from wanting something so intensely that anything other than moving as fast as possible feels like dying slowly. The speed is a natural consequence of extreme desire meeting finite time.
Now obviously, these two are extreme outliers amongst outliers. Most of us won’t feel that level of intensity. But you study the greatest bodybuilders not because you want their exact body, you study them because they figured out the methods better than anyone else. Same thing here.
Napoleon and Musk figured out speed at a level nobody else has. Let’s see what we can learn from them.
How Napoleon won
In 1805, Napoleon faced a massive Austrian army under General Mack that had positioned itself at Ulm, in what is now southern Germany. The conventional move would have been to march south and meet them head on. Napoleon did something else.
He swung his entire army (over 200,000 men) in a wide arc to the east at a speed that nobody thought was possible. His troops marched for about a week in brutal conditions, covering distances that military planners of the time would have considered absurd. By the time Mack figured out what was happening, Napoleon’s army was behind him. The entire Austrian army’s line of retreat was cut. They were surrounded without a real battle having taken place.
Mack surrendered. This whole movement took out 60,000 Austrian soldiers. Napoleon himself said he won this campaign just by marching.
The greatest military mind in history, with all his tactical genius and all his strategic brilliance, said that what led to his greatest victory (this was right before Austerlitz) came down to moving faster than the other guy.
The same thing happens in regular life, in an obviously less dramatic way. A lot of the problems that keep people stuck (overthinking, doubt, second-guessing, fear of making the wrong choice) are problems of slowness. They grow in hesitation. When you actually move fast, when you compress the time between deciding and doing, most of them just dissolve. You’ve already acted before the doubt had time to settle in.
This wasn’t a one-off for Napoleon either, his entire career was built on this. He was famously impatient even when ahead of schedule. His generals would report that they were making great time on a march and Napoleon would tell them to go faster.
He set timelines his staff thought were physically impossible, then pushed everyone to near-breaking trying to hit them. Even when they fell short, they moved faster than any army in Europe. Speed was his edge more than any battlefield maneuver.
Elon and the 50% rule
Musk does the same thing in business, and he’s completely open about the logic behind it.
He sets deadlines that everyone around him knows are unrealistic. His stated philosophy is that he aims to miss about 50% of them.
This sounds like a weird thing to aim for, but the reasoning is logical: if you’re hitting all your deadlines, they weren’t aggressive enough. You left speed on the table. And if you’re missing all of them, you’ve disconnected from reality and your team stops taking them seriously. 50% is the sweet spot where the pressure is real enough to compress everything, but not so detached that people give up.
The deadline is a tool. It creates urgency, it kills hesitation, it makes people find the fastest way to get something done instead of the most comfortable way.
And he pairs this with something else: “Failure is essentially irrelevant unless it’s catastrophic.”
At SpaceX, they purposely test rocket engines to their breaking point. They blow up engines on the ground constantly. It costs a lot of money every time. But each failure teaches them something specific, and they use that to build the next version better and faster.
The logic is simple: it’s better to break 50 engines fast and end up with the best possible engine than to be cautious and slow and try to get it right on the first attempt. Failing fast is painful and expensive, but it gets you further than moving slow and being careful.
“It’s better to pick a path fast and fail, than to hesitate and not make a decision.”
Speed creates energy
Desire and energy create a need for speed. What if you don’t have them right now?
I’ll get into how to increase desire and energy later, but the less obvious direction is more interesting: speed creates energy. And many never discover this because they’re waiting for the energy to show up before they start moving.
When you actually do things and produce results quickly, it generates its own momentum. You finish something, you get a small hit from it, and you want to do the next thing. That thing produces another result, which pulls you forward again.
Before long you’re operating at a pace that would have seemed exhausting if you’d tried to plan it in advance, but it doesn’t feel exhausting because the results are feeding you. You also get clarity you didn’t have before, because you can’t think your way to the next step from your couch. The next step only becomes visible once you’ve taken the first one.
I’ve seen this in my own life. The periods where I’ve been most productive weren’t the ones where I had the most energy going in. They were the ones where I started moving and the energy showed up because things were happening. Action came first, energy followed.
Last summer I moved to a mountain cabin for a full month. No electricity, no water, no internet. One morning I decided to clean up the garden, which was a disaster: an old outdoor toilet half falling apart that needed to be dismantled, trees that had grown too close to the building and needed to come down, years of accumulated junk everywhere. I stood there looking at all of it and had genuinely no idea where to start. I had never done anything like this in my life.
So I just started picking things up and moving them out of the way. No plan, no order, just grabbing whatever was closest and clearing it. Soon enough, something clicked. I could see what needed to happen next. Then the next thing after that. The clarity didn’t come from thinking about it, it came from moving. Each thing I did revealed the next thing to do, and before I knew it I had spent the whole day working and the garden was half cleared.
There’s a Rumi quote I like: as you start walking, the way appears. That’s exactly what happened. The plan didn’t exist before the action. The action created the plan.
And the opposite is just as real. When you slow down, when you spend a week deliberating or “planning” or waiting for the right moment, the stagnation drains you. You lose momentum. Everything feels harder than it should. You think you have a motivation problem or an energy problem, but really you just stopped moving.
Passivity doesn’t just waste time, it actively makes you more tired, more lethargic, more stuck. It puts you in a depressive state that feels like it needs a solution, when the solution was just to start doing something again.
So speed and energy feed each other in both directions. Speed is an easy entry point, because you can CHOOSE to move fast right now without waiting for anything.
Now let’s talk about how to apply all this to your life.
We’ll cover:
Musk's equation for fast progress
How to increase your energy and desire
A simple method to find out where your time actually goes
Napoleon's ruthless approach to discarding what doesn't matter
How to increase speed using Elon’s example from SpaceX
What to do about the years you've already wasted
How to train speed into a daily habit
Let’s go.