Alex Snider spent fifteen years inside federal work, in domestic policy, at the State Department, at the World Bank and in the Senate. Then a bicycle accident stopped him, and he came out of it having written a book arguing that you should sometimes be late on purpose.

He is careful about what that does and does not mean. He is not a productivity guest, he does not do tips, and when Bart asks him for the one thing people should do to slow down, he says he cannot answer that and will not try. His argument is that how you receive an idea is so different from how anyone else does that handing out instructions is the problem rather than the fix.

What he offers instead is a distinction. Speed is not the enemy and slowness is not the goal. The question is whether you slow down enough to notice which one a moment is actually asking for. He calls the other half of it emotional punctuality: the difference between having shown up for the meeting on time and having actually been present for the person in it.

The most useful thing he says is also the most uncomfortable. He says he is not a good person when he is rushing, and that the book is about the kind of people all of us become under a sense of scarcity and urgency. Then he says the part most authors leave out, which is that he still loses to it. He names another writer whose success makes him feel behind, by name, and says he gets dragged into comparison every single day.

Bart matches him, with a story about scrolling LinkedIn on a family holiday in Hawaii, seeing another speaker with more bookings than he had, and his daughter asking him why he was even looking at that now.

In this episode:

Why he turned down the show's signature question before answering it

Learning to skip things rather than add them

Why he refuses to tell anyone how to slow down

What he noticed about the way Bart filled in, and did not fill in, his own preparation

His brother at the train station, and a phrase worth stealing about tangled nets

Emotional punctuality, and what it costs to confuse it with being on time

Where he politely disagrees with being where your feet are

Fifteen years in government, and why none of it was mindful

The bike accident, and what a forced pause actually is

The gap between the person we say we want to be and the person we are

ABOUT ALEX SNIDER

Writer, facilitator and meditation teacher, and a former government strategist. Author of Sometimes You Should Be Late: The quiet rebellion of slowing down in a world obsessed with speed, published by Practical Inspiration Publishing with a foreword by Diana Winston. Co-founder of Mindful Fed, the first government-wide mindfulness community. He writes the Human Bureaucracy column for Psychology Today.

Website: https://www.slowmindfulness.com

Most People Don't... But YOU Do! is hosted by Bart Berkey, who spent 16 years as a global executive with The Ritz-Carlton and now builds HUMANALITY(tm), a system for making people feel cared for, valued, seen and heard rather than processed.

Listen, subscribe and share: https://www.bartaberkey.com/podcast