For as long as I’ve been in this profession—and that’s 36 years if you’re counting—we’ve treated speed like a mystery. Something magical. Something only the “naturally gifted” possess. Something you achieve by memorizing more, phrasing more, predicting more, and thinking faster.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth:
**Overthinking always leads to slow execution.
Always.**
This isn’t philosophy. It’s neuroscience.
It’s motor learning.
It’s common sense.
When you want slow, careful output—like when you’re pondering a principle or analyzing a problem—you add decision points. You deliberately introduce friction:
Should I consider this angle?
What if the opposite is true?
How does this compare to Rule X?
What about the exception to the exception?
That’s the whole point: to limit output so you can think harder.
But the moment your goal is speed, agility, or flow, every high-performance field arrives at the same conclusion:
You must remove decisions.
Athletes remove them.
Musicians remove them.
Pilots remove them.
Chess grandmasters remove them (yes, even they rely on patterning, not calculation).
Surgeons remove them.
Firefighters remove them.
Top-tier programmers remove them.
Because the more decision points you introduce, the more hesitation you create—and hesitation is the enemy of speed.
So why, in steno, did we ever believe the opposite?
Why did we think that adding:
more phrasing
more prediction
more branching
more outline variants
more context-dependent rules
more cleverness
more options
…would somehow make us faster?
How were we ever convinced that more thinking equals more speed?
The answer is embarrassingly simple:
We were measuring the wrong thing.
For decades, the only metric anyone tracked was stroke count.
And when you measure only stroke count, you build a culture—and entire theories—around chasing fewer strokes.
That’s how we ended up with systems that were brilliant on paper but brittle in reality.
Theories that looked “efficient” while quietly flooding the writer’s brain with decision friction.
Because stroke count measures output.
But it says nothing about:
hesitation
prediction volatility
recovery cost
context switching
fatigue accumulation
mental friction
cognitive wear
flow disruption
These are the things that decide whether you survive an eight-hour deposition—not whether you can phrase “did you ever” in one stroke.
We optimized for cleverness, not cognition.
We built systems that prioritized theoretical possibility over human reliability.
We built techniques that encouraged reporters to gamble on prediction instead of grounding them in stability.
We built entire careers on managing chaos instead of reducing it.
And then we blamed reporters for being exhausted.
We blamed students for dropping out.
We blamed working writers for falling off their phrasing high the moment a witness started mumbling, rambling, interrupting, or speaking like an actual human being.
But here’s the truth we forgot:
**If you want speed, you remove decision points.
You don’t add them.**
Steno was harder than it needed to be because no one ever asked the foundational question:
“Does this theory reduce decisions or increase them?”
If it increases them, it cannot produce sustainable speed.
Not reliably.
Not under fatigue.
Not for normal nervous systems.
Not in the messy, unpredictable world of real testimony.
Theories like BREVITY aren’t “boring.”
They’re unburdened.
They feel light, clear, steady—because the system is finally doing the job, not the reporter’s working memory.
Once you feel that difference, you can’t unfeel it.
And once the profession measures that difference—hesitation counts, cognitive load, fatigue curves, prediction failure rates—the myth that “more thinking makes you faster” will evaporate in a week.
We’re approaching that moment now.
And steno will never be the same afterward.