I started my career building website and playing around with tech stuff.

My cousin brother started a company and I joined him as the CTO; with minimal knowledge and wisdom in the tech domain. A leap from building websites to heading a company’s tech team; impossible, but that happened.

I made a significant error in not starting slow, opting rapid climb up the leadership ladder. The C-suite title tempted me more than the Junior Software Engineer role. Ever since that, I have never worked below a C-suite role, or rather I was not able to.

I faced the dual reality of being unprepared for the position and the pressure to quickly acquire the necessary skills. In the middle of chaos, I somehow fulfilled the responsibilities.

Fast forwarding to today, I see young talents choosing the C-suite in their own one week old company; the only advice echoes ‘start slow’.

Titles will be tempting, but think long term, think stable, think realistic, think without bluffing to yourself, don’t try to bypass milestones. The process you hate is the process you need!

These are not regrets but learnings from the mistakes that I have done whilst building my career. I lead a team of engineers now. I was created from the learnings, advices from wise people and moreover a lot of trials and errors. I wish people to discover the slow but fast alternate journey.

Thanks to Faris Mohamed for unintentionally giving me the title to this story. (He mentioned ‘slow is fast’ in a random deep conversation we had.)