The Pitfalls of Taking It Slow

Ruslan Bredikhin
Jul 27, 2017 · 5 min read

There’s this book I read a while ago, Think Big, Act Bigger by Jeffrey W. Hayzlett, which essentially doesn’t have anything special about it: just like thousands of other marketing books, it has about 5% of meaningful thoughts burried in 95% of hyping, bragging and ambiguous use-cases. But as sometimes happens (and as it did this time), those 5% can actually contain some priceless ideas.

For me in this case it was the idea that if you start working on a big project, you should never ‘take it slow’: either it’s really important and you must dedicate a substantial amount of your resources or you have to seriously question yourself if you need to do it at all.

Situation

To illustrate what I mean by it, here’s a (not so) hypothetical situation. Imagine you want to do something big, something that’s supposed to take months or even years of your time. For sake of making it more vivid, let’s say you’d like to learn French (or any other language that’s new to you). How would you start here? Given a certain level of uncertainty (pun intended) you probably have about your new goal (“am I able to learn French?“, “do I have any of that proverbial ‘talent for languages’?”, “would I even like learning French?”, etc.), you decide to start small, take it slow and see how it goes. Let’s say you come up with a plan to learn five new French words a day. Sounds realistic? Sure. This makes it 1825 words a year, and you read somewhere that it would allow you to understand 80% of the common conversations in French. And this way you should be able to figure out in a while whether you want to continue learning it or not. Isn’t it great?

Well, now let’s see what usually happens after. You start with a bang, download some flashcard apps, set up daily reminders, and — why the hell not — even announce some friends and / or family members that you’re learning French now to get more motivated. It all helps you to successfully make it through the first week or, if you turned out to be a person with a high level of perseverance, through the first (several) months.

Then it all somehow changes. You begin to notice that you reschedule your flashcard sessions more and more often for one reason or another (too tired, too much stuff to do, preparing for an important meeting, etc.), that you start to forget the words you supposedly learned and that the initial excitement about the French language in general, well, it’s just gone. You spend some more weeks (or even months) telling yourself that you have to do it, that you will reach your initial goal, whatever it takes, ’cause after all, you’re not a quitter, are you? And then you just stop. You probably decide that you, indeed, don’t have that talent for languages, or that French is not that beautiful / interesting, etc.(your excuse at this point is truly not that important). You delete the flashcard apps and lesson reminders, since they just scream ‘failure’ in your face every time you see them. You move on.

Does it sound familiar? 😉

Analysis

Let’s figure out what actually happened here. First, was there a complete and deep understanding of what you really were trying to achieve? To learn French, I know, but what for? Was it to impress your girlfriend / boyfriend / colleague? Or to be able to watch French movies? Or for your upcoming trip to France? Whatever it was, you should had clearly realized it before you started. Moreover, this reason should had conformed to your core values and lifetime goals (yeah, you should have those as well, by the way). You can always check something like this using a technique similar to the Five Whys: if you’re not hitting your values / main life principles / goals at some point within this kind of check then there’s a strong chance you don’t actually need to learn French (or whatever it was that you were trying to do), it’s just not yours, as they say. In this case your motivation is simply won’t be good enough to carry you through any real difficulties, should they occur on your way. Yes, you may still have self-discipline, but as amazing as this one is, it can often lead you the wrong way.

But what if your motivation is fine: you know what you need and why you need it. Still, you have to choose the right tool for the job. If you’re going to France on vacation, for example, and you already know your itinerary, then instead of just learning random words you should write down some possible situations you may end up in, then make a list of words and phrases that can be useful in each of those, translate them, learn how to pronounce, etc. It may seem obvious, but very often people just try to apply someone else’s answers to their own very specific questions, and then wonder why they fail.

Okay, but what does it all have to do with taking it slow, you ask? Just bear with me for a moment and we’ll see it.

When you decide to take it slow, but you choose the wrong tool, it may take a while before you notice that you’re actually going in a wrong direction. And loosing your priceless time is probably one of the last things you would want for yourself.

Next, even if you got the right tool for the job, taking it slow may simply kill the initial momentum. When something becomes a routine, it may be good for a task that doesn’t require much attention / creativity, but at the same time it may be poisonous for an area you’re exploring, for something new you’re trying to learn. Here we got back to the motivation issues again: when your learning sessions are too small (even if they are regular), your progress can be so hard to register that it may feel like you’re simply not moving forward. So, naturally, at some point you’ll just start questioning yourself whether this makes any sense at all.

Finally, if your speed is not high enough, there’s a strong chance that at some point you will actually start moving backwards. Whatever it is what you’re playing against (e.g. some kind of competition, industry changes or even your own abilities to consume and store information), it can turn out to be more steady / faster / better motivated. So, somewhere along the line you can find yourself solving a task that’s not relevant to the real world situation anymore, or learning an obsolete technology, or, well, just forgetting the words you learned before, like in that French language example above.

Conclusion

To summarize it: if your project is really important, if it’s trully yours and you know, how to achieve your goal, then you simply shouldn’t take it slow. Dive in, allocate a substantial amount of time and take it by storm. Otherwise, don’t do it at all: life is too short to do things that are not trully important to you.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explore new stuff, you definitely should, just make smaller and more specific goals in order to do it. Meaning, before you decide to eat an elephant, you should taste it first, right? 😁

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