Why slow and steady wins the race

 We all have heard the story of the hare and the tortoise where the hare got tired in the middle of the race, slept while the tortoise who was slow but steady overtook the race and won the race. In this article, I am going to talk about why does slow and steady really win you the race. 

1. Consistency over intensity:  Do you remember how you were taught to write and read? You were first taught a,b,c,d, e...z and then incrementally you were taught rat, bat, cat, dog, etc by looking at the pictures. Would you be able to learn the spelling encyclopaedia if you were not taught a,b,c or rat, cat,dog, etc. Not at all right, so that's where we all start and incrementally take on more and more challenging stuff. Going directly over encyclopaedia would definitely make you lose hope, and sometimes even confidence. So being consistent while learning and adapting to incremental challenges will make sure you stay consistent over time. 

2. Avoid burnout: Completing more than human things per day will tire you out and wear you down. However, if you do something let's say for one hour each day, you will be able to avoid burnout have fun in the process and even keep your consistency intact. 

3. Resilient : Every now and then there would be small setbacks, but that would not derail your confidence or would not make you hopeless. As you are having a longer term goal, you would get back in the grove the very next day forgetting the impact of yesterday. 

4. Builds good habits: When you do something for one hour each day or maybe 2 hours each day, you would now have the habit of learning during the time, whether that's time for learning cricket, a life skill, a sporting skill or maybe even a new language, you would cultivate habits easily in that case. 

5. Quality over quantity: This thing particularly worked well for me in case of leetcode, I remember I used to sit down for one hour each day, take a break of 15 mins and then do something else, but the one hour I used to try and code with great concentration. Imagine if you know that you have to do leetcode all day long, you would try to accomplish more sums rather than understanding the sums that you do in depth. So a slow and steady approach also brings you quality over quantity. 

6. Patience: Take any big goal in the world, whether that's Sachin Tendulkar's 100 centuries, or whether that's winning a olympic medal, all of these goals require consistency, practice and most importantly patience. You cannot just build rome in one day and that would always be true no matter what. 

7. Insights: In his book, Deep Work, Cal Newport suggests something called as downtime. Whenever someone does intense work, there has to be a closure time at which he/she closes the work and then enjoys whatever is in front of the individual. Going for walks, playing soccer, etc can be examples of what you do in the downtime but what downtime helps is in generating insights and valuable thoughts for work. You would get ideas that you have not got otherwise. 

8. Easier to be in flow: Imagine you want to learn something, maybe that's playing a guitar, or maybe a new language, its much easier to focus on what you are doing when you tell your mind that I will be doing this for one hour only today. You can increase your challenges incrementally, like for an example if it's about learning a new language, learn the greetings first and just focus on the greetings. Tomorrow just focus on the action verbs, and then some adjectives, then pronouns, just keep learning incrementally and I am sure you would not lose motivation in one day. 

Exercise: Pick a skill you want to learn, whether it's learning guitar or swimming or talking to people whatever it is. Now chose to do something about it for an hour or 2 each day. Don't try to over do it and say I will learn the entire skill in one day, unless it's something that easy. But if it's learning a new language, it will take more than one day for sure. Learn it for an hour each day, don''t do more even if you have the urge and see where you are 3 months from now.