Slow and steady

My approach in setting up this blog was to try to follow the adage: slow and steady wins the race. My natural tendency is to launch into things with gusto, and then lose enthusiasm and focus. I’ve come to learn that mindset is really important, and that keeping on doing something is far more important than getting caught up on how things feel on a particular day. My approach here is to make the task easy enough to be able to stick with it, slow and steady.

My wife is a yoga teacher, and the same is exactly true in her area. Some yoga classes feel fabulous, others might be hard. But what really matters is just turning up and slowly, steadily making progress. A few days/weeks/months of heroics will mean nothing a few years down the line, but small, incremental gains week by week will add up to something meaningful.

This is beginning to touch on an area I first came across on the Tim Ferris Podcast. Tim was interviewing Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame), who spoke very convincingly about the difference between systems and goals. In summary:

• Goals hang over you like the smell of failure, until you (maybe) hit them. If you don’t, though, you’re back at square one
• Systems are all about setting up regular behaviours that move you in the intended direction. Even if you don’t get exactly where you expected, you will learn things along the way

“Slow and steady” persistence is a system for achieving things. I plan to write more on this subject in future (but it may take longer than five minutes).

Photo by Marcus Dietachmair on Unsplash