The Most Powerful Move You Can Make Right Now Is Slowing Down

**Matthew Gottesman** (0:02)
Welcome to The Niche Is You. My name is Matt Gottesman, at Matt Gottesman on Instagram, and this is my daily podcast where I create short, quick hitting episodes to help you uncomplicate life, creativity, and the pursuit of your highest self. There's only main character energy here. Now let's get into it.
Welcome to episode 825, the most powerful move you can make right now is slowing down. The most powerful move you can make right now is slowing down. I know some of you are like, wait, momentum, wait, I can't stop, wait, I don't want to lose what I've started. It's not what I'm talking about. Often you've heard me mention that slow is not a speed, it's precision. Slow is where the clarity comes from. Sometimes we need to give ourselves permission to stop doing all of the things, so we can do the right things, right? In the show notes, you know that there's a recommended reading list, and of course, one of my favorite books in there is Essentialism by Greg McKeown. He says, 90 percent of the things that we do as a waste of our time, find the 10 percent and really work hard for those things. We need to slow down so we can see, hear, decide, right? We need to create literally inside of the community I created on Substack, in the private side of the community. That's what it is. It's like, hey, can we remove the noise for just a moment? Because the thing is, I get to ask people all the time, creators, makers, writers, entrepreneurs, all kinds of people, like, hey, I want to do this, I want to do all these things, I need help. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what do you really want? And it almost catches them off guard because like, no, I want this. I'm like, no, no, no, I get that like, because you've been taught that like, for your business or for your idea that this is what it should look like from the outside world. I'm like, what does it look like for the inside world for you? So it's been a very, it's been very interesting growing this. I think right now it's about 350 people inside this community. You're more than welcome to join. It's a year long. It just keeps running all the time. And but, you know, there's, there's the side of like clarity, and then there's the side of building. And we need both. And when I say building, it's not even just necessarily like a brand or a venture. It's really your life. It's your world view. It's your, you know, just building the world of you, right? Because when you have time to think, to remove the noise, to settle your nervous system, you can think clearer. Answers suddenly come through. And I think that's why the burnout is just so epic right now. You're seeing it everywhere, because people are like, I can't do this anymore. Sometimes, the most powerful move you can make right now is slowing down. So in this episode, I want to talk about why slowing down has become the most counterintuitive and most powerful move you can make. That's right, you know I love to challenge the norms and get you to think about it from a different perspective. I also want to talk about how our pace of life has been quietly making everything harder than it needs to be.
So I've watched some of my mentors, I've watched, especially my current mentor, what a pace of life that he goes at. And he reads, and he has activities, family time, does all of these things. Mind you, he's a bit older.
But that's not why he's always been that pace. He doesn't go at the speed of everybody else, but he goes at the speed of himself. And it's allowed him to be very clear and very precise in everything that he does. And he teaches me a lot about finance, and teaches me a lot about history, like ancient history as well. And he teaches me a lot about building a business. He teaches me a lot about precision in details and things, right? Life stuff, all kinds of stuff. But what I found is the people that I admire the most, they have a pace that works for them. And because they go at... Here's the thing. They... What looks like a slower pace than the rest of the world, i.e. they don't have the frantic energy the world has, they just get it done. It's like they're living in moment to moment, present state to present state, because they are, right? So I also want to talk about what slowing down actually unlocks across your work, relationships, faith, body, and decisions. I want to mention your finances. And I'll talk about why almost every answer you're searching for is already trying to reach you. Again, when I first started these quarterly challenges a year and a half ago, we've just completed six over the last year and a half. And they're ongoing, by the way. This is inside of the Substack. They're ongoing. Every quarter lives on its own, but every quarter can play on top of each other, but people can enter into the challenge at any one of them anytime they want. When I first started it in quarter one of 2025, it was exactly that. It was like, I get so many people like, how are you so clear? How do you hear God? How do you get your answers? And I'm like, you need to slow down. And so what we did that first quarter was clarity, intuition, direction, and creativity, right? Because creativity is what fueled, people often think like creativity is like arts. No, it's actually your approach to pretty much everything in your life. You know, you were made in the image of the creator, right? God. So, you know, when we slow down, we can hear intuition. We can go, why is that coming up? I should look into that. Our clarity comes here like, hmm, I think this is what I need right now. Maybe this is what I should be asking for, getting support in, right? Or direction. It helps with our direction. Like, you know, this is probably what makes the most sense for me right now. Now, I mean, my friends, my crew, all are the same, but I've got adjacent friends, people that I've known or grown up with that when they're so busy, especially if they got that corporate life, I get it. I totally get it. But, or and, I always give the advice, still try to find and make time for yourself. I think I only have one friend, he's one of my best friends, only one friend that's actually corporate that has this down pat. It doesn't make him busier, actually, at all. Well, he handles things very precisely, right? But the point is, is that he figures out his pace, and that's actually what does really well inside of the corporate world. So, I also want to talk about the practical work of decelerating in a culture that keeps speeding up. And we're watching what happens when everybody says, I can't, I don't want to do all the things anymore, I want to do the right things. And then they're picking the game or the lane that they really wanted to play, and they're then doing really well because they're very focused.