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PRODUCT.|PHILOSOPHY.|LIFE.

Speeding

I was cycling through the rainforests in Siem Reap, Cambodia yesterday, as part of a visit to the various temples that the city is famous for. In the forest, there is no speed limit for how fast one can ride their cycle, unlike on a highway where there are speed limits for cars.

The idea of speeding comes from these limits. Whenever I hear the assistant in a taxi blurt out, "Please slow down, you are now speeding", I know that it is calculating the current speed of the taxi and comparing it to the legal limit and if the current speed is higher, it throws out that message to the driver. This is a simple algorithm.

However, even without speed limits, there is such a thing as speeding while riding a cycle in the forest. Only there, the algorithm to detect speeding is a little less of a mathematical equation and a little more of intuition.

During the ride, I pushed myself to go faster and faster and at a certain speed, I began to get the feeling that I'm going too fast, that is, I'm speeding. When I thought about what brought about that feeling, it was the fact that I felt like I was losing control of the bike and that I wouldn't be able to effectively stop at will or avoid running into a tree with certainty.

Speeding simply became the point beyond which I felt like I was losing control of the cycle that I was riding.

When you feel like you're going so fast, making decisions so fast, step back and think whether you still feel completely in control of affecting the consequences (the control that you are expected to have and not over external circumstances). If you aren't, maybe its time to slow down a little.

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