Never rush

I’ve been unusually stressed on a few fronts recently, and it showed over a couple of days at work when I made some… not great decisions. Not terrible, but certainly reflecting that I wasn’t on the ball.

I took full responsibility for it, as I do, and came around to being a bit self-deprecating with some of it, because I’ve long believed no one should take themselves too seriously. One of those latter moments was me explaining it to a co-worker I look up to, adding that I was rushing through it (truth) because of how much work there was to do (also true, and also one of those stressors I mentioned). He calmly shook his head and just said, “Never rush”.

Those words really struck a chord, and in the days since he said it, I’ve been thinking about how wise and broadly applicable that advice is.

At first glance, it may seem silly. “Never rush? Of course I have to rush sometimes. What if I need to do a lot but don’t have enough time? What if I’m running late for work? What if…” etc.

But mull it over a bit longer and you’ll start seeing some truths reveal themselves: Any time you rush, you’re not giving due time or consideration or real effort to what you’re doing. If you have to finish something faster, you won’t — can’t — give it much thought, you won’t pay as much attention to what’s going on around you, and that may cause more problems, or even an accident. That happens way less often if you slow down to a more normal pace to give the task its due attention and care.

Late for work? It happens to the best of us, sometimes for reasons completely out of our control. But if you take transit, it will still only go as fast it ever does, so feeling like you need to rush will only turn into frustration and maybe make you rush more once you’re finally at work. And if you’re driving and try to rush? I don’t need to get into what problems and dangers can come from that.

Military veterans also know the downsides of rushing. Instead, they teach that efficiently focusing entirely on your task will, in and of itself, make you quick: “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”

That’s a saying applicable to other tasks, as well, including sports.
Before these latest Olympics, I saw a few interviews with winning sprinters, and every one of them said that to win, you need to be in a seemingly ironic state of being so relaxed that you can go faster. Their point was, and it had abundant evidence, if you’re running at optimal speed and then push yourself to go faster, your muscles of course tense up, which necessarily shortens your stride and actually slows you down.
Sure enough, in the finals of the Men’s 100m Sprint, Jamaican runner Kishane Thompson lead for most of the race but then he saw American Noah Lyles creeping up on him. In the slow replays you can see exactly when Thompson then starts straining, pushing himself to go faster, while Lyles stays calm and running smoothly and ends up beating the Jamaican runner by 5/1000ths of a second. Had Thompson stayed the course, had he kept his composure and just kept going at the pace that had given him the lead, he probably would’ve taken gold that day instead of the silver he got.
Slow was smooth, smooth was fast.

Even in mundane situations, that applies.
A friend of mine once told me a story in passing about a friend of his who worked one summer digging ditches, paired with an old Italian guy. The friend, let’s call him Frank, said that the old Italian guy would work for a while at digging, keeping a steady pace, and then take a break for a smoke and sometimes a bit of wine. Then he’d get back to it for a while, and then take another break.
Younger and wanting to prove himself, Frank put his head down and busted his ass to dig as much as he could as fast as he could while the old Italian guy did his work and took his breaks again and again. And Frank soon discovered that he was winded. He had made himself sore and unable to keep digging too much. Worse still, he saw that the progress he had made wasn’t as much as what the old Italian guy had done.
Slow was smooth, smooth was fast.

You may have concluded, as I did, that this seems to be a modern repackaging of an age-old lesson that we all learned from Aesop (circa 600 BCE) in the story of The Tortoise and The Hare: Slow and steady wins the race.

But repackaging an old saying doesn’t change its value. It was true then and is still true now.

This doesn’t mean intentionally slow down what you can do. It’s not a prescription for laziness or an excuse to not get work done. The idea is that you find where your optimal speed is for doing what you need to, fully and effectively, and keeping that going will prove faster and get better results than if you push yourself beyond that speed purely in the hopes of accomplishing it faster.
Find the point of diminishing returns and keep yourself just this side of it.

Will I be able to live by the credo of Never Rush?
Probably not as often as I should. But I’ll certainly strive to, because I’ve always got more to do and never seem to have enough time for everything. Maybe the solution this whole time hasn’t been to try to rush to do it all, but on the contrary, slow down to do it all.