Latency

When you’re speaking on a microphone and wearing headphones, you can hear your voice at the exact same time as you are speaking. It’s a strange sensation at first, but for me it’s a really useful tool of monitoring and adjusting what I’m doing with my voice. I get to hear the eventual output live and that lets me adjust and learn on the fly.

If you try and do this with a set of bluetooth headphones, you’ll run into a problem called latency. This is when you speak and a split second later you hear your voice.

The most annoying split second to ever exist. You can quickly drive yourself nuts.

Latency removes our ability to course correct. We hear the result after we make the noise.

It’s rare that we see the effects of our actions immediately. In life there exists a latency; a kind of lag between something we do and the result it yields. Latency is challenging because we can’t know if what we are doing is working. But at the very least knowing about life’s tendency for latency will remind us to wait a little bit longer before we give up.

Don’t give up too early; what you’re doing may well be working, there may just be a lag. Victory might be just around the corner.

That said, here’s an idea I stole from my mentor…

How to beat latency:

Do something 100 times or 100 days straight- then look up and see where you are.