Progress is great, rapid progress is not

Paul Lonsdale
Aug 28, 2017 · 4 min read

Are you a tortoise or a hare?

Photo by Gary Bendig on Unsplash

Let’s take a minute to cast our memories all the way back to ‘The Tortoise and The Hare’. There’s a slow-moving tortoise and fast-moving hare, and, automatically, we would presume it is the fast-moving hare that wins the race. But (spoiler alert) this is not the case. In fact, it’s much the opposite. The tortoise wins the race.

The moral of the story is no matter how fast you think you are, or how quick you think you can accomplish something, it’s all about the process. The end result doesn’t help you grow as a person, but everything you take in along the way does and that’s why trying to move too fast means everything becomes a blur.

Returning to Aesop’s fable, let’s think about the process between the tortoise and the hare. The hare moves quickly, the tortoise does not. Imagine for a second that this is no longer a race. Let’s make it technical and assume that the tortoise and the hare have to work independently to produce a product to market. Now, depending on how good your imagination is, you may be visualising a tortoise and a hare sat with their laptops, the hare typing rapidly and tortoise typing slowly.

Defining the process

Our new fable so far consists of a tortoise and a hare both having full technical knowledge of how to develop a product, of which they have been given a brief and now have to define the audience and build it accordingly.

A tortoise is slow (I’m sorry if you’re a technical tortoise reading this, I don’t mean to judge) whereas a hare is much faster. Again, it would be presumed that the hare would win this race as it would want to work at full speed to produce something ready to ship. But let’s just pause and realise it’s not who gets there first, or who is the fastest, it’s the product that is the most thought out that will be the most appealing.

For that reason alone, the slow tortoise is likely to be more methodical, thoughtful and build a more considered product. Again, another win for the tortoise.

It’s more likely that the product of the tortoise is better than that of the hare (sorry hare, I judged tortoise a little earlier, now it’s your turn, I do apologise). So this becomes the lesson of the technical tortoise and hare story: it’s not about how quick you get there or how much you produce, it’s the quality. Remember that old phrase ‘quality over quantity’, perhaps not as old as Aesop’s fable, but it is still extremely important.

Take a break

Just in case you skipped the heading, I mean this: take a break.

Before you start judging me like I did the tortoise and the hare, let me explain. This is completely against the fable, but you should take a break. The process is all about taking a break. Do something. Stop. Do something unrelated to the process. Go back to the something.

It’s tempting, especially in the web industry which I work in, to be caught up in the new and shiny, to be expected to know everything and understand the latest and greatest. However, your number one priority is you. Rest when you need to. Relax when you’ve had enough. Most importantly, walk away when you hit a problem. It’s likely your subconscious mind will fix it for you when you return. Besides, a hare running so fast that it suddenly bursts into flames is no good to anyone; burnout is a real thing.

Life isn’t a race

You don’t want to grow to dislike what you’re doing. There is no rush. There is no race. There is no technical tortoise or hare. We’re all just humans (more on that in the future).

It’s about enjoying the process, doing what you enjoy and learning new processes. The way I see it is that each project is a chance to learn, whether it’s a small side project or huge commercial project, this is your chance to question everything you do to find out if you can improve yourself and your work.

Continue to grow. Continue to challenge yourself.

Continue to make progress, but not rapid progress.

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Paul Lonsdale

Written by

Dry-humoured, quick-witted lead Web Developer, who likes doing clever things with words, with a passion for anything web and tech related.

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