Inspired by a friend’s recommendation, I’ve been listening to Greg McKeown’s book Effortless. I love the wu wei-ish ethos woven into it. Last evening’s chapter, centered on the theme “slow is smooth, smooth is fast”, hit me with a whole lot of relevance: as Aesop told us long ago, steady progress is a much more reliable path to success than glorious surges followed by recovery.
This particular phrase comes from the military, where careful speed rather than max speed means that fighters are prepared to respond to changes, rather than surging, and then responding “on the fly” to new situations they’re unprepared for. McKeown also used a different, vivid illustration of the Scott and Amundsen expeditions to the South Pole: Amundsen set a pace of constant progress, however hard or easy; Scott drove to exhaustion on “good” days and didn’t move on “bad” ones. Amundsen ended up at the pole a month earlier than Scott’s group; Scott’s group made it to the pole, but never returned.
The Lean concept of even flow echoes Mckeown and Aesop; variation causes problems and won’t serve you well. And the idea of “margin” (I, um, haven’t had time to read the book by that title) resonates with it as well. When you always push to the max, McKeown points out, you don’t have the space to recover, and your long-term performance trends downward.
I’m taking this as an input to my daily schedule: I can surge to minimize sleep, but over the long term, doing so will require recovery, and harm me rather than helping. How will you incorporate it?
Known Unknowns 