Slow Is Smooth, Smooth Is Fast

"When you are talented and smart, you know what you want and you know when you want it done. You want it done now, that is. So you work fast. So you try to build momentum. So you look for ways to make efficiencies. You don’t want to waste time. The problem is that in hurrying we often end up causing delays worse than if we’d taken it slow."Find out why it so important to be deliberate in your actions in today's Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. When you are talented and smart, you know what you want and you know when you want it done. You want it done now, that is. So you work fast, so you try to build momentum, so you look for ways to make efficiencies. You don't want to waste time. The problem is that in hurrying, we often end up causing delays worse than if we'd taken it slow. From the Roman historian Suetonius, we learn that "festina lente" was the motto of Rome's first emperor, Augustus. Augustus, who had two Stoic teachers, Arius and Athenodorus, thought there was nothing less becoming in a well-trained leader than haste and rashness. His favorite sayings were "more haste, less speed, better

• 1:09Ryan Holiday?

  a safe commander than a bold, and that is done quickly enough, which is done well enough." The first one is rendered so simply in Latin that it's worth saying again, "festina lente", "make haste slowly." It's easy to rush in, it feels good to start doing, but if you don't know what you're doing, why you're doing it, and how to do it, well, it's not going to go well. If you're going quickly for the sake of speed, you're going to make costly mistakes, you're going to miss opportunities, you're going to miss critical warnings. In the military, they have another way of expressing this idea. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. In Stoicism, we know there is no prize for doing things first, and that the only thing that matters is doing them well. So slow down today, go smoothly, go with less speed,

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  and you may actually go faster, and you'll definitely go better. Hey, thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. You can sign up to get our daily email at dailystoic.com/email. I also encourage you, if you want to take your practice of Stoicism to the next level, to sign up for Daily Stoic Life, which is our members-only program. It's got all sorts of awesome benefits. You can check that out at dailystoiclife.com.