Too much, too fast

Forty feet down under the Brooklyn Bridge

In 1870, men in New York started digging at the bottom of the East River.

They were building the foundations for what became the Brooklyn Bridge. To get under the water, they used caissons. Giant wooden boxes the size of small houses, sunk to the riverbed and pumped full of compressed air. The air held the water back so men could dig dry. Forty-four feet down on the Brooklyn side. Almost eighty on the Manhattan. They called them Sandhogs.

The technology worked. Going down was easy. The pressure pushed them in.

Coming back up was where it killed.

The compressed air had forced nitrogen into their blood. Climb out too quickly and that nitrogen turned to bubbles inside the body. Joints folded grown men in half. Some lost the use of their legs. Some died on the ride up. They called it caisson disease. Today we call it the bends.

By the time the caisson work ended in 1872, more than a hundred workers had been hit. The chief engineer, Washington Roebling, came up too fast one day. He ran the rest of the build from his apartment in Brooklyn Heights, watching the site through a telescope while his wife Emily took over the daily work on the ground.

It took years before a French scientist named Paul Bert proved the cause was nitrogen, not the depth.

The depth was never the killer. The speed of the return was.

We forgot this

Now think about the last couple of years.

Something took you down fast. The work got faster. The expectations got higher. The hours that used to be yours got handed to the thing in your pocket. Maybe AI sped it up. Maybe it was just the era.

The descent felt like progress. And it was. You shipped more. You answered faster. The machine of your week kept hitting its numbers.

But descent is the easy direction. Pressure does the work.

The ascent is the part nobody trained us for. The way back, where you let the day leave your body before you start the next one. Where you stop and feel something. The body needs that pause.

You probably already know what this feels like

The work shipped. The week went well on paper. You still feel a little hollow at the end of it. You sit down to dinner and you’re there, kind of. You scroll while your kid is telling you a story. You agree to something on Sunday and resent yourself by Tuesday.

That’s the bends. The quiet version. You went down too fast and you can’t quite surface in one piece.

A leader I coach hit this wall a few months ago. By every external measure, he was crushing it. Promotion. Bigger team. New scope. He came in for a session and said, “I don’t recognize the person doing this job.”

Then he said the thing. “We’re moving faster than we’ve ever been. I just don’t know what I think anymore.”

He came up too fast. The output surfaced. He didn’t.

What divers figured out

Divers solved this the obvious way. Not with a stronger body. With stops on the way up. You wait at a certain depth. You let the pressure leave you. Then you climb again.

It looks like inefficiency. It’s the only thing that gets you to the surface in one piece.

You need yours.

Pick one thing in your week that refuses to run at machine speed. A conversation. A morning. The first hour after you wake up. Something that runs at the speed of you, not the speed of the calendar.

It’ll feel unproductive. That’s how you know it’s working.

Output is just how deep you got. End the day on a different question.

Did I feel like the person doing this work today, or just the place it passed through?

The sandhogs didn’t die because they went deep. They died believing the way down and the way back could run at the same speed.

That’s what we do too. We descend faster every quarter and expect to surface whole.

Slow your ascent.

It’s the only way anyone has ever come up in one piece.

Stay human
- Bryan

P.S. If you’ve been moving fast and can’t feel the work as yours anymore, that’s the bends. It’s not weakness. Reply if you want to talk it through. :-)

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My family in Hawaii, 2021

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I’m Bryan, and if you’re a leader or executive, pull up a chair. Fancy stuff: Built companies in Silicon Valley. Gave a TED Talk. Keynoted 200+ times.

Crashed hard. Found my way back. Lost 85 lbs. Ditched diabetes. Moved to Lisbon. And as it turns out, you can operate differently at any age.

Now I work with leaders and teams who’ve proven themselves but know something needs to shift.

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