186,000 miles per second

No, that’s not my average driving speed when commuting to work and back - though some may argue it’s pretty close. Actually, that’s the speed at which light travels to work and back and everywhere else. To put that into context, if I actually did drive at that speed, I could completely circle the globe almost 7.5 times in a single second. That makes the carpool lane a less attractive option. By comparison, a passenger plane traveling 500 miles per hour takes about six hours to cross the continental United States. In those same six hours, a single beam of light could have traveled around the entire world 182,000 times. Whew!

As marketers and communicators, we’re constantly moving at what feels like the speed of light. New technologies emerge, market dynamics change, business needs change and more. Now, we find ourselves in the constant flux of COVID-19 and the ever-changing environment that comes with it. As the world around us, including the needs of our organization, changes we move right along with them, making our own adjustments to our thinking, approaches, processes, strategies and executions. While operating at that pace can be exhilarating, it can also be quite exhausting.

But that’s how we roll. Develop, deploy, monitor, test, optimize and test again. Wash, rinse, repeat. Be fast. Fail fast. That’s what helps make top-performing teams. The trick is to continue moving at that speed but also be responsive and fully effective. So, I challenge you to continue putting Einstein’s theory to test and keep operating at unthinkable speeds while, at the same time, ensuring you aren’t going so fast that you make careless mistakes or you’re not able to be fully effective.