The table you study at

At a university in Irbid, two students with the same grades sit at different tables in the study hall.

At one table, people arrive early, phones go face down, and by the end of the evening someone has finished a chapter and is explaining it to the others. At the other, people drift in, talk about the weekend, and leave at nine with the same pages open that they started on.

By the end of the year they are not the same student any more. Neither is especially more gifted. One of them simply spent a year beside people who moved quickly, and kept up.

We underestimate how much of our pace is borrowed. The people around us set what normal looks like: how fast work gets finished, how ambitious a plan sounds, how often someone actually starts the thing they keep talking about. In some neighbourhoods and some trades, people open small businesses as a matter of course, and the next person does too, because it looks ordinary.

That pace is rarely chosen. It is inherited from whoever happened to be nearby.

But it can be chosen. A slow or careless or cynical crowd is not a law of nature. You can try to change the tempo of the table you are at. Or you can pick up your books and walk to another one.