Why Speed Without Strategy Is the Most Expensive Mistake You Will Ever Make

We live in the fastest era in human history.

You can order dinner in three taps. Watch a city skyline through someone else's eyes in real time. Send a payment to another country in seven seconds. Build a business in a weekend. Lose one in an afternoon.

Speed is the air we breathe now. And speed has convinced most people of one of the most expensive lies of our generation.

That moving faster means making progress.

After 30 years in the Navy, leading over 6,000 personnel and managing more than a million dollars in budgets, I can tell you with full confidence: that lie has cost more careers, more marriages, and more reputations than almost any other belief I have watched men carry.

This comes from a chapter in my second book, The Book EXs, called "Expedite: Respecting Time and Strategic Action." It is one of the most practical things I have ever put on paper. And it might be the chapter your future self most needs you to read today.

The Question That Started It All

I open the chapter with a single question.

"What role does urgency play in your decision-making process?"

Most people have never sat with that question. They have lived with urgency for so long that they have stopped seeing it. Urgency is the wallpaper of their daily lives. The constant ping of notifications. The packed calendar. The half-written emails. The deadline that started as next month and is somehow now next Tuesday.

Urgency tells them what to do next. They follow.

But here is the truth I learned in command after command: urgency is the enemy of strategy. When urgency runs the show, strategy gets demoted. And once strategy is demoted, the quality of every decision drops.

Time is a resource. Time deserves respect. Time refuses to be controlled — and yet it punishes anyone who pretends otherwise.

Speed vs. Strategy: The Real Definitions

Expediting is sometimes confused with rushing. They are different.

Here is the line from the book that hits hardest:

"Speed without strategy, like uncontrolled technological advancements, can be as dangerous as it is impressive."

Read that twice. The danger is hidden inside the impression. People watching from outside see the speed and call it leadership. The leader who is rushing knows better. He or she can feel the corners getting cut. The relationships getting thin. The quality slipping. Eventually, the bill comes due.

Three Signs You Are Moving Too Fast

After three decades of watching this play out in uniformed and civilian environments, I can spot the warning signs in five minutes.

One. Your reputation is outpacing your reality.

Things start getting easier. Doors open. People start saying yes when they used to push back. This feels like success. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is the early signal that your hype has run ahead of your work.

"Be cautious when things begin to feel easier to attain. It may signal that your reputation has outpaced your reality." The cloud nine you are on attracts people eager to ride your momentum. Some of those people are real allies. Others are modern-day Trojan horses, blending into your circle while quietly working to benefit themselves. When the pace is too fast, you stop being able to tell the difference.

Two. The same kinds of mistakes keep showing up.

When I see a leader making the same category of error twice in a quarter, I already know what is happening. They have stopped pausing long enough to learn. The exercise of life is supposed to carry lessons. But you only collect the lesson if you stop long enough to extract it.

Pure speed skips the extraction. The next mistake feels like a fresh problem when in reality it is the same problem wearing a different uniform.

Three. People are starting to feel like obstacles.

Watch how you treat the people in front of you on a busy day. The cashier. The team member with one more question. The family member calling at the wrong moment.

When pace is healthy, those moments feel like life. When pace is unhealthy, those moments feel like friction. People become things to get past on the way to the next thing. That is the tell. Strategy puts people at the center. Rushing pushes them to the edge.

The Elon Musk Example (And What He Got Right)

Setting the politics aside, the strategic move made at Tesla in the early 2010s is a clean illustration of expediting done right.

The strategy: At Tesla, the focus was on building a luxury electric vehicle — the Tesla Roadster. The Roadster was the funding mechanism. Selling high-end cars to early adopters proved the technology was viable, generated capital, and created a story the market could understand. With those proceeds and reputation, Tesla scaled production for mass-market vehicles like the Model S and Model 3.

Notice the structure. Speed served strategy. The pace was fast, yes. The pace also pointed somewhere specific.

The key elements of strategic leadership in expediting success: a clear vision that inspires action, focus on high-impact priorities, flexibility to adjust plans, adaptability to evolving circumstances, and resource management that ensures every effort contributes to the overall goal. Anticipate challenges. Prepare contingency plans. Mitigate risks to maintain momentum.

That is real expediting. That is what most people miss when they watch fast leaders and try to copy the speed without copying the strategy underneath it.

The Practice I Still Use Today

The most powerful expediting habit I have ever practiced is also the simplest.

Weekly phone calls.

Yes, in 2026. With AI in every pocket and video on every screen, I still pick up the phone and call the people who matter most to me. Family. Mentees from the Lambda D-R-E-A-M Academy. Old shipmates. Brothers from the fraternity.

"Even in our digital age, returning to direct human interaction helps us avoid falling into isolated, primitive ways, instead promoting clarity and connection."

The reason it works is the reason most people will skip this advice. The phone call takes time. It cannot be done while driving safely, while eating, while folding laundry, while answering emails. It demands your full presence for ten minutes or thirty.

That presence is the expediting. You build a real relationship in a tenth of the texts. You handle a misunderstanding before it becomes a grudge. You hear something in someone's voice that they would never put into a message.

Most people are too busy to call. They send a text instead. The text feels efficient. Over a year, the texts add up to a hundred shallow exchanges and zero deep ones. That is rushing. That is speed without strategy.

Pick three people this week. Call them. One call each. Ten minutes minimum. Watch what happens to those relationships over the next ninety days.

A Self-Check You Can Run Right Now

Sit with these four questions before you close this tab.

Write the answers down. Out of your head. Onto paper or a screen. Writing forces the kind of clarity that thinking alone cannot produce.

A Final Truth From the Book

I keep one line from this chapter close. It is one of the truths that came from collecting hard lessons across 30 years on both sides — military and civilian.

"Expedience breeds expensive regrets."

Every shortcut I ever took in my career wrote a check that arrived months later. Every relationship I rushed produced a misunderstanding that took twice as long to repair. Every decision I made under pure urgency cost me twice what a slower decision would have cost.

The math is simple. Speed without strategy is a loan. The interest rate is high. And the bank always collects.

The leaders who win are the ones who learn this early. The ones who refuse to learn it learn it anyway — just later, with a higher tuition.

Pace yourself. Life is a marathon, never a sprint.

Move with intent. Let strategy lead and let speed serve. Build the kind of life that gets stronger as the years compound, instead of the kind that looks impressive at 30 and hollow at 60.

Time is the only resource you cannot earn back. Spend it the way you would spend the last dollar in your wallet on the most important meal of your life.