The Hare and the Tortoise: A Reflection
As really small children, most of us heard the story of The Hare and the Tortoise. It is rather famous; it would be unusual for someone who has had an English-speaking education to not have heard the story. It’s essence is, in case you haven’t heard or read it or have forgotten it is that in a race between a slow tortoise and a fast hare, the hare runs far ahead of the tortoise and becomes so confident of winning the race that he stops mid-way on the track and falls asleep while the tortoise maintains a steady pace throughout and even though he’s really slow, he reaches the finish line before the hare who woke up too late and crosses it before the latter can catch up. The key catchphrase is “Slow and steady wins the race.”
Is this right? How does this work out in real life? Let me share my understanding of how well this story plays out.
Let’s look at it from the career race in society. The race up the corporate ladder, the entrepreneur’s unicorn race, the race to stardom in the film and sports industries and so on. The hares are understandably those who are better equipped at running the race; they are naturally faster than the tortoises who are not as talented or as skilled the hares.
Here, one could likely think that the hares are the entitled people; the Rahul Gandhis who are born into power or wealth and have easy entries into top positions without having to work hard or at all for them. That is a wrong interpretation of the analogy. Because, you see, the hare and the tortoise run the same track and the same distance. The entitled folk don’t start from the same position, they’re already there. That’s maybe a whole lot more unfair. But let me digress and analyse that well enough.
Let’s say there’s a great businessman who rose from the middle class, hustled through the world and ran a start-up. He faced all kinds of problems, saw all kinds of people before and during his enterprise. He gets to know the consumers, the bureaucrats, the investors and the workers pretty well when working from the age of twenty one to the age of thirty, hustling on his corporate job, after which he starts the business and because he knows the stuff so well and has learnt to handle situations, his business turns out great. He’s not all-wise and makes errors but he learns from them and moves ahead too. When he’s sixty and sitting on his comfortable chairman’s chair in the swanky office being interviewed by a simpering journalist for being so great, he looks back on the hardships and problems he faced on the journey and how he reached out on top. Each problem he solved brought a moment of glory to his life. Each major hurdle he failed to get behind him was a tragic affair. But they were highlights of an eventful life that he lived well. And he’s happier at the end of it.
Now assume he has a son who grew up from when his father was a millionaire to when he became a multi-billionaire and all he saw was luxury and more luxury. He went to the best school, went to the best vacations with his family, got the latest toys and whatnot, and when he inherited his father’s sprawling empire after doing his Masters in Management from a university in Europe, had analysis of years of data, systems and teams set up to deal with problems his father had faced, and to the world and probably his father, had things cut out and way easier for him. He didn’t have a race. Are things too good for him? I don’t think so. Because the things he got easy were the material needs of consumption. He got food, healthcare, infrastructure, care all ready for him and never had to worry about them. But those who take these things for granted are animals and people who live undeservedly bad lives where they need to worry about the base so much, they can’t build the structure. But he didn’t get to learn. He didn’t see the world outside his father’s bungalow and BMW except in pictures and passing glimpses. He didn’t see the hectic lives of employees and consumers and the whims and ways of bureaucrats and investors. He didn’t learn to think and solve problems. he didn’t solve the problems his father did, or even encounter them. And so, to the world and to himself, he doesn’t have a great, glorious story and hasn’t built credibility for occupying the top post. Because even you won’t feel like an achiever if you’re just standing where the finish line is with your hands in the pocket and didn’t run the race.
He has different problems now. He must prove himself to himself, probably his father and most probably to the world. He, without having the business experience or practical knowledge, must maintain what his father has built, not attack but defend in the cut-throat market and handle boardroom politics, HR complaints and PR issues on being so big and rich. These are problems of a different story, and this happens to be his story. But because he hasn’t learnt a thing and hasn’t hustled already or seen the world, he’s not equipped to run this new race.
Because standing at a finish line does not warm you up for running till the next one.
But this is not necessarily the case. It may be that he becomes more successful and more famous than his father. He expands the business, betters the work culture, rocket launches the share prices, becomes a name in even more households. All this would happen when he is good enough to do so. So it may be that his father put him to work at junior level positions at random companies or his own companies and find his way through it, or his school gave him a great simulation of the practical world. Or he put his nose into papers and documents and cases and spent months learning coding and analytics and everything new in the world along with working beside his father on the important things happening at the company. Then it makes sense that he’s prepared to do well or do great. But here, he’s run a race and has a story too. Sure, it was simulated prep and training, not the real race but the long training scene in Rocky VI is super-famous for a reason. And if you’ve seen the film, you’ll know that the brilliance of the story is doing more when having less. Buying something at 100 and seeing it shoot to 1000 is a lot better than seeing it shoot up from 1000 to 1100. And you’re going to be more concerned about keeping the value at 1000 than going up.
We all have hustles and situations in life and they are of different kinds. That depends on chance. I don’t advocate that we do nothing about the differences in the kind of stories people have and just let them play them. I don’t say that we shouldn’t help the poor by giving them resources and let them struggle and get their own. Because there’s an acceptable standard below which our stories’ themes shouldn’t fall. Hustles to turn small businesses in garages to huge companies; society shouldn’t intervene. Hustles to turn your 3 BHK into a duplex of a two-story house or turn your bike into a car; we shouldn’t intervene. But if your hustle is about getting two square meals a day, keeping your family member from dying, spending most waking hours making sure the floor isn’t overrun with water or rats and that your children are protected from disease and death; we need to intervene. Because the dignity of human life is about making sure that the human life is spent on better things than worrying about having the basic things in life. And it extends to making sure that you don’t have to constantly worry about the electricity going out, or your daughter’s dowry, or the healthcare and legal bills and taxes and keeping your life running by breaking your back working and still not saving much. These are things that shouldn’t happen. There are amenities we should be able to take for granted; we need to have socioeconomic and political security for everyone. But once that base is met, it’s up to us to find and make our own stories.
And now we return to the hare and the tortoise. Does slow and steady win the race? Firstly, what do you mean by ‘win the race’? And that’s a complex question, I feel, and needs a considered philosophical answer.
The most common race is the race to the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy; most accomplished means most famous and richest. Maybe everyone doesn’t dream of getting to the top, but they all want to be pretty high up. It’s probably all right to have this aim but it isn’t alright to let this be the only and the most important aim your life could have. Because the question we should ask ourselves is; are there not better races to run? I think there are. Accomplishing something does not need to mean being the most prominent person in the socioeconomic set-up around you. The goals you set can be independent of the hierarchies and can be specific to your discipline or life. And I’m willing to bet that such goals are much better to move towards. When you’re really fat, the objective of gym-ing and dieting till you have a body that impresses people around you and makes you attractive can be alight, but it sure isn’t better than the goal of being able to run at lightning speed and win an athletic event. Pictured properly, the image of you showing your biceps to or lifting weights in front of the world won’t be as appealing or as satisfying as imagining the sensation of you lifting 200kg and putting them down. The cheers can be important, but they shouldn’t be more important than the thing that’s bringing them. Because hierarchies are there even in apes and other animals inferior to us. And they will exist for us because we’re basically animals too. But we’re conscious beings who are different in very prominent ways. Going beyond such hierarchies is what makes us humane. It’s probably not possible to click your fingers and suddenly become indifferent to how impressed the people around you are with you. But if you consciously try to not care and focus on something for its own sake, you’ll probably get closer to it. And that’s true in all domains. Hit a six not to impress your friends but because you love cricket and want to be great at it. Work hard on setting your child’s future not so that you can boast to your relatives that he or she is richer and more successful than their kids but because you love the kid and want to see the best for them. Work on an initiative not so that you can go down in history as the best Prime Minister or President but because you genuinely want to abolish slavery or make the healthcare system sensible. Most of these examples are concerned with caring and morality and love and not being selfish; the things that colourful butterflies and smiling adults told us when we were seven year old children on TV shows. But a big problem with those messages are that they don’t give the complete message; you should have these qualities or values not just because they’re right and they’re good but because they make you embrace your humanity and become superior beings to others who don’t have them and to what you will be if you don’t embrace them. And they’re characteristics that come in when you choose a purpose. You don’t go about life thinking that your job is to just be honest and selfless and caring because you have to. You choose a finishing line and if it’s a great finishing line or a great peak to climb to, you’ll become these things on the path to getting there. And the goal of being honest or loving or caring even in the worst circumstances also seems a pretty heroic goal, if someone ever takes it up.
The thing is; we often switch races because the tracks to different finish lines often overlap. And we often compete in some races while running others. You have to become the President before saving the country. Or maybe while saving the country you become the President. We can be weak enough to get lured into more immediately appealing but far less gratifying finish lines during the race. Changing tracks and races aren’t really a problem. But make sure your running career makes sense.
A question that should be addressed, I believe, is that of stamina. Why do we need to keep running in life? Why do we need to run so much? And when one race starts, we run to another. Is it worth the while? There are two aspects to this. The first, from what I can guess, is existential.
Not running can mean you sprint, or jog, or brisk-walk, or walk or just stand and maybe lie down or sit. The last three aren’t good because it is not natural for us to live in stagnation, without moving in any direction or having any purpose at all. These cases are those of nihilists whose lives have no work, no goal and nothing to look forward to. Evidence suggests that such people don’t do well in terms of happiness. They’re likely always miserable and have mental health issues. When they stop, they decay. So you should have something that keeps you going. And races are of different types. Maybe you run a marathon and have a permanent job and a family and you’re purpose is in the long run. Maybe you do 100m sprints and live life project to project, chapter to chapter, with a lot of intensity. And that gives you purpose. But you gotta keep going at it.
And here comes in the issue of whether slow and steady wins the race. I think the answer to that you can’t make an absolute statement like that. Because if a hare is actually that stupid and sleeps that long, the tortoise will win. But if the hare sleeps just enough to wake up in time, stretch, catch up with the hare and win the race, then the tortoise won’t win. The hare might not even sleep even when it is confident that it’s going to win.
The hare will grow complacent when it is only racing with the tortoise and probably when it doesn’t think too much of the race. But it will not do so when there are other hares in the race as well. If the tortoise is in a race with more than one hare, the hares will take their running seriously because of the competition and not sleep. The tortoise is bound to lose out. In our society, it so often happens that the hares are not even aware that there are tortoises in the race too because you never see them while running. They’re way behind you. You probably didn’t think at the starting line, if you saw them, that they were there to run too.
There hares are those with greater ability; the smarter, sharper, physically stronger or faster and more talented people. They are, to use common phraseology, the meritorious. And in a race without handicaps and when they don’t make terrible choices like go to sleep or get struck by a boulder or something, they will win against the tortoises. Is that unfair? Not really. Because they’re not supposed to be in the same race.
A really big problem with most modern cultures is that we focus, as societies, on the few things that are most prominently visible and there’s little or no initiative to focus on other things which could be just as meaningful. You care so much about the school basketball competitions that nobody cares about the chess team. That’s when the basketball team players are like celebrities on the campus and the potential chess team players who didn’t get to find purpose in playing chess but, like everyone else in the school, partly chose and partly were pushed, into aligning purpose in school life with doing great at basketball or other popular sports. And if there are chess players (or guitarists or anything) who are really bad at basketball and can’t even play it at recess, they’ll get resentful about the fact that the kids who are genetically better suited to play basketball and had training from years ago and happened to land onto the team at the right time or sucked up to the coach or whatever were privileged and had an unfair advantage. They have an advantage for sure but it’s not unfair. What’s unfair is that the school and the student body is so geared on basketball that it forgets all else.
The idea is that a tortoise isn’t meant to run! Hares are, like cheetahs. But if you throw a stone or a pebble at a hare, it’ll get hurt. The stone won’t bounce of it’s rock-hard shell. It will for the tortoise. And it is a problem that in societies and communities, some domains are glorified and others are ignored. It either creates sorrow and wastefulness for those who would have excelled in their domain or never gives them the opportunity to even try it out.
But this is a case where people have different kinds of abilities and everyone’s good in something or the other. There’s also a problem within domains and in general. Because there are people who in general, are smarter or more capable than others. Or maybe have the some kinds of intelligence that makes them great at a lot of things in their own way. If you’re a super-smart coder and practical enough to know what to code, you’re running a massive corporation and are a billionaire before you’re 25. There are millions of coders; they don’t get that. And millions of people with business ideas who don’t get that either.
The difference is of ability and possibly also of circumstance. The tortoise is not just slower but possibly, from the way its moving, its tail or the ground is really hard to get ahead in. And to re-emphasize, it is really slow. And it’ll lose the general race against the hares, unless there’s a single hare.
But the answer to this ties back to the concept mentioned above. The tortoise still has a different race to run. It’s just that the track is the same, maybe even the length. But the duration will then be different. It is not in competition with the hare and shouldn’t be. That doesn’t dis-regard what the tortoise is doing, that just makes its race so much more glorious. And I am confident that doing something when you are less competent at it makes for a greater and more meaningful journey that when you already excel at it. If someone’s brain is a calculator and they can solve logical puzzles in seconds, they’ll likely breeze through the Common Admission Test (CAT) for IIMs in India, a hyper-competitive MBA entrance test. For me, who gets concepts but is terrible at handling numbers and making quick calculations and remembering formulae, getting 80%ile in the quantitative and logical reasoning sections seems impossible. I’ll have to work and practice a lot harder than the smarter guy for the same exam and it may seem unfair to me but if I crack CAT, the sense of glory I’ll feel on result day will be much higher than hers, and it’ll be a happier experience for me.
Psychologists have discovered from experiments that when we answer questions about how happy we are, we don’t give you a sum of how happy we’ve been feeling through the moments. We anchor our happiness in the most significant things that happen to us and the points of highest happiness have a lot of influence on specific time periods. That is to say, most days in my college life or my gap year may not be that great and may even be irritating or sad or something but if I got a great CAT score in that same period and felt really nice about it, I’ll remember the time a lot more fondly.
Of course, most of us would not be able to really be happy about working hard at CAT and getting through and even getting the top three colleges and going there because the competition is cut-throat and we’ve got to worry too much about settling the student loan and getting settled with a good enough job to enjoy that. And that’s another problem that society needs to address; we shouldn’t have students who are, not conscious of, but concerned of and burdened with financial problems that might even make them animalistic in their competition for placements and in the workplace. Problems like these and those of the chess players who are bad at basketball are what bring toxicity in cultures. Because the only race now is to climb the hierarchy and there’s little scope to run a race ending at a better finishing line. The root of the problem might be more economic that cultural.
But when these structural flaws in our systems are done away with, it is fine for you to run, walk, brisk-walk or jog as per your own pace. All you have to do is live up to your capacity.
