Slow and steady wins the race. When you’re slow, it’s hard to even get picked for a team much less win. And yet so much in life requires slow, steady progress. Knowledge builds on knowledge. Strength is gained incrementally. Health builds from good habits over time.
We used to value the lesson of the tortoise and the hare. Then came fast everything – fast food, fast casual dining, speed dating, and immediate news posts. Fast channels currently top activity in the streaming world.
As a result, expectations changed. Tolerance changed. And yet, the effectiveness of slow, steady progress didn’t change. For some reason, anything that’s not immediate is now considered too difficult to attempt so we mold reality to our will by denying it. We demand immediate action and immediate results. Rarely is there a good long-term outcome to this behavior.
It is within our power to make different choices even when they’re hard. We just need to practice a few things.
What do slow and steady require?
Patience. Talk about a commodity in short supply. We are not a patient people. We want complete and immediate results. Unrealistic expectations lead us to view small bits of progress as no progress, lessening pain as inadequate relief, and grief as a process to be avoided. Impatience presents problems in many areas.
When it comes to health, impatience may lead some to abandon healthy habits before results are visible. It can lead to demands for medication when other approaches would be effective but take longer. A lack of patience may lead to impulsive behavior or riskier choices.
Dedication. Commitment to a particular course of action is required to stay on course over time.
Perseverance. Adhering to a course of action over time is inherently required for slow and steady improvement.
Open-mindedness. Not all standards, protocols, or methods are based on solid science or unimpeachable knowledge, yet they persist as “the right way.” As new peer-reviewed, rigorous scientific information becomes available, we must be willing to learn and adapt without being thrown off course.
Desire. None of the above is worth the effort if we don’t have a desire for improvement. And maybe that’s why all of this is hard. Maybe we would rather skate through life than put out the effort required because we just don’t have the desire to do better for ourselves.
It could be we feel like we’ve done our best despite not having put in much effort. Maybe someone has treated us in a way that causes us to doubt our worth. Perhaps we were taught everyone else is more important and using energy on ourselves is selfish. If these, or similar, beliefs hamper our desire to get better, or be better, we’ve identified a starting point for improvement.
Beginning a healthier path doesn’t require a large production. It doesn’t necessarily require an immediate reversal of every habit in your life. Small changes can lead to slow, steady progress and slow and steady can still win the race!
