By starting slow, you'll go fast.

Have you ever tried to speed up the process of anything? Trying to take a shortcut, skipping a few steps, and the next thing you know is that the simple recipe you were trying to follow is a mess, the app that you were building crashes on every other device, and so on. But why do shortcuts lead to such failures? And how do successful people get away with taking shortcuts and still get success? TLDR; they don't take shortcuts.

You want instant gratification

Around four months ago, when I started learning guitar, I was nervous about learning to play this instrument. I've been listening to Linkin Park, Greenday, Pink Floyd, etc since I was a 9 year old or maybe younger. I had the image of lead guitarists in mind and how beautiful those guitar solos sound to my ears. Then I started learning guitar for the very first time. Even making "A" and "D" chord shape was tough, let alone switching between them fast enough. I tried to do those changes fast before even trying to do them slowly because slow ones didn't sound good but the reality was I couldn't make fast ones sound good until I perfected myself at playing it slow. But why was I hurrying? When I sat and relaxed during meditation, I realized I was doing that just to hurry up the process, maybe look cool to others, and had incorrect expectations for how long it'll take me to play guitar anywhere close to the lead guitarists of those bands that I listened to. So, instead of looking for instant gratification, I started enjoying the process. I would go slow for a day or two days, and then the next I would see my fingers moving faster and more accurately. In four months itself, I'm able to play a lot of "pop" songs, and also melody for "Autumn Leaves". Now, when I look back at the four months journey, I'm really satisfied.

A similar thing happened last year when I started going to nearby Gold's gym and started doing strength training for the first time in my life. The first thing that every gym trainer and someone who has been working out for years told me to start with lightweight and increase the weight gradually, and the moment I realize that posture is getting compromised by the heavier weight then, just drop the weight. And if you think about and see those people who try to lift heavy weight with incorrect posture are not only risking their health but also the fast progress that they can gain by following the correct technique but for what? Just attracting the eyes of others in the gym, getting validation from them. But in reality, people worth impressing won't get impressed by those incorrect techniques.

Successful people don't take shortcuts

The whole concept that "rich" and "successful" people are evil and have taken shortcuts to achieve success is a misnomer. It's a half story. It's true that they have taken shortcuts in aspects of life which don't really matter, but they've worked hard in the aspects of life which really matter. Successful people are simply better than the general population at prioritizing and segregating high impact aspects. They won't waste time thinking about what all clothes to wear every day, instead, they try to have a wardrobe in which they have multiples of the same garment. They won't try to search for coupons endlessly, instead, they'll negotiate when it comes to higher impact stuff, like salary, business deals, real estate and keep investing with discipline. Pareto principle is a beautiful thing and I've discussed about it in detail here.

They start slow and stay consistent with it for years. They set realistic goals and try to follow right technique to achieve those goals. I'll talk about how to shortlist all the high impact work that you can do in the next blog post

That's it for this blog post and if you feel that you've something to add to this or you have a different perspective then share it and discuss it on r/StoicHuman or go to the Reddit discussion post for this blog post linked down below.

Stay healthy, Stay safe!

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[Discussion Post] By starting slow, you'll go fast. from r/StoicHuman