Truth Bomb Tuesday: I don’t think we have the right handle on what this means.
“Slow and steady wins the race.”
That’s the moral from the parable from the hare and the tortoise, right?
Only, that’s not really the take-away.
The turtle didn’t win because it was ‘slow and steady’. The turtle didn’t win. The hare lost. The hare lost because it just decided to goof off and lost sight of the race.
That should be the lesson.
Don’t goof off and stay focused, kids.
But I actually wonder if we’re supposed to zoom out, and look at this parable not as a lesson in how to win races, but in how to win life.
I sometimes think I’m lucky that I wasn’t a particularly brilliant child. I had a lot more interest in horses than in history or hypotenuses, so I was never top of my class.
Same story in my early professional life. I was a competent accountant, but not brilliant. I wasn’t being head-hunted by the big accounting firms.
But what that all meant was that when things really hit the fan – when I woke up and found myself a single mum with a tonne of debt and a failed business – I didn’t have brilliance I could fall back on.
I didn’t ask myself “How can I apply my exceptional talents to get me out of this mess?”
No, I had to ask myself, “How can an ordinary mum, with nothing but a bit of time and perseverance make herself several hundred thousand dollars in a few short years.”
(Little secret: The answer was property.)
And so I think talent can be a trap.
And I think we all know a couple of people from school who were particularly brilliant, or beautiful, and they had the world at their feet.
They seemed to be winning life at an early age. They were the hare.
But they feel into believing that their talents would see them through, and they stopped investing in themselves. They had learnt that you could win life without any particular effort, and so they became allergic to effort. (The hare having a rest.)
But at some point, the captain of the footy team realises that footy doesn’t pay the bills. The captain of the netball team realises that female sport is still woefully underfunded.
The smartest guy in my school, who topped every exam without doing an hour of study, flunked out of university.
And what they see when they look around, is that in the race of life, they begin to get overtaken by the turtles.
The turtles didn’t start strong. But they learnt the power of consistency. They learnt the power of hard work. The learnt the power of grind.
Slow and steady.
And so they became life-long learners. They invested in themselves and their education. The kept at it.
They realised these things were gold. And they look up one day and realise that they’re winning at life.
That’s me. I’m the turtle.
And the beautiful lesson?
You can be a turtle too.