"Moving fast is not the same as going somewhere"
About this Quote
Speed is one of our favorite disguises for purpose. Robert Anthony’s line lands because it punctures a modern superstition: that urgency equals progress. As an educator, he’s not just warning against busyness; he’s diagnosing a habit of mind students (and institutions) slip into when outcomes get fuzzy. If you can’t define “somewhere,” you can always sprint in place and call it momentum.
The intent is quietly corrective. “Moving fast” evokes productivity theater: packed calendars, rapid iteration, the dopamine of checking boxes. “Going somewhere” demands a destination, a theory of change, a standard for what “better” looks like. Anthony sets them side by side to expose their non-overlap. The sentence works rhetorically because it’s almost insultingly simple; it doesn’t argue, it just rearranges familiar words until the contradiction becomes obvious.
The subtext is sharper: haste can be a form of avoidance. When you’re moving fast, you don’t have to sit with uncertainty, measure what matters, or admit that the path you’re on might be wrong. In classrooms, “fast” can look like cramming, skimming, chasing grades. In organizations, it’s shipping features without clarity, mistaking velocity metrics for value. The quote reads like a rebuke to systems that reward visible motion over actual direction.
Contextually, it fits a late-20th-century self-development and management moment that prized efficiency, but it’s arguably more at home now, in an always-on culture where being busy has become a status symbol. Anthony’s point isn’t anti-speed; it’s pro-aim.
The intent is quietly corrective. “Moving fast” evokes productivity theater: packed calendars, rapid iteration, the dopamine of checking boxes. “Going somewhere” demands a destination, a theory of change, a standard for what “better” looks like. Anthony sets them side by side to expose their non-overlap. The sentence works rhetorically because it’s almost insultingly simple; it doesn’t argue, it just rearranges familiar words until the contradiction becomes obvious.
The subtext is sharper: haste can be a form of avoidance. When you’re moving fast, you don’t have to sit with uncertainty, measure what matters, or admit that the path you’re on might be wrong. In classrooms, “fast” can look like cramming, skimming, chasing grades. In organizations, it’s shipping features without clarity, mistaking velocity metrics for value. The quote reads like a rebuke to systems that reward visible motion over actual direction.
Contextually, it fits a late-20th-century self-development and management moment that prized efficiency, but it’s arguably more at home now, in an always-on culture where being busy has become a status symbol. Anthony’s point isn’t anti-speed; it’s pro-aim.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|
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