From my understanding, the reason why thinking in terms of how is linear and slow is that you have to identify what you need to do to be able to achieve it. You are the person that needs to do or that needs to know how to achieve something.
But what if you don’t know how to do what you need to do yet? What if you are still lacking the skills and capabilities to do what needs to be done?
Well, to be frank, what you need to do next is to actually learn the skills. You need to learn the technicalities to be able to do so. You need to spend time learning, studying, and mastering this needed skill.
For example, you need to learn how to create your own website. If you have no programming background yet, then you need to spend time studying. It could take you a month, a year, etc.
In this case, for example, you have something else to do for your website. However, given your time constraints, you cannot do it yet cause you have to study building up your website.
As mentioned, thinking in terms of how is linear and slow. Your progress is limited by your own capability and knowledge and time. You have to take one step at a time.
If you are focused on doing everything yourself, then you are limiting the resources you can use to achieve your goals. If your resources are limited, then your potential, your options are limited too.
Who is non-linear, instantaneous, and exponential
With this, the author highly recommends that we need to challenge our trained response to problems or to the goals that we want to achieve. As mentioned above, how is quite limiting.
If you want increased freedom in your life, you simply can’t approach it by doing all the Hows. You need Whos. Thinking in who is non-linear, instantaneous, and exponential.
Let’s use the same scenario of building your website.
By thinking in terms of who, you just need to identify who can help you out build this website. And when you find this person, and the person you chose is already an expert, then this person can already get to work.
He can already start building the website of your dreams because he is an expert in this field. With this person’s help, you can create or you can have your website may be in a matter of days or weeks, as compared to when you intend to learn website development yourself.
The time you have managed to save up can be used on another aspect of your business. You can ask also different Whos to do other things while you spend your time doing the most important facets of your business.
NOTE: I still recommend also for you at least learn the foundations of website development or programming in general. It is an essential skill that would definitely benefit you in the long term.
Conclusion
I hope you get the core idea on the difference between thinking in terms of how and who.
How is linear and slow
Who is non-linear, instantaneous, and exponential
When you have a new challenge to face, think in terms of who, not how.