Slow and steady wins the race because it removes our emotions from getting in the way. The ones who achieve quick success loses it even quicker by the end. Our emotions are the biggest enemy when it comes to achieving success.
I’ve been there before. There were days when I made $10,000 from gambling in one day, alone. It’s no surprise that I began to think that I was invincible. Only to lose all of the winnings and then some in the subsequent months thereafter.
Quick and fast wins make you feel great in that specific moment. However, it’s not long-lasting. It lasts a short while and makes you feel euphoric for a couple of days or so. After a while, the effects give you a distorted sense of reality. A recipe for disaster.
The times when I kept my wins were ones when I earned the dollar, one at a time. I earned a $500k net worth at 28 because I slowly earned it. Every day that I toiled for my paycheck. Every day that I kept putting money away towards my investments.
Because it took me such a long time to get there, I appreciated the winnings even more. Slow and steady wins the race because it makes you manage risk in a much better way. Risk is why we succeed but it’s also what causes us to lose everything thereafter.
Building our life slowly but surely is a great way on how to achieve success in life.
Slow and Steady Wins the Race: What it Means
Slow and steady wins the race means to build our life one day at a time. The ones who chase quick and easy wins are destined to fail. They just don’t know it yet. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither are our successful lives. Life is a marathon, not a sprint.
The best thing to have ever happened for me is the day that I kept my expectations low. When I expect to fail is when I’m not subject to any of my emotions interfering with my successes. When I expect success and get failure, I get disappointed. The opposite is true.
There’s a reason 70% of lottery winners declare bankruptcy in just 5 years. They didn’t earn their successes and money. They then have a distorted sense of success and think that success just comes from scratching off a ticket.
That’s not real life. Success is hard work and sacrifice over years and years. Even the ones who put in the work have a chance of not coming out successful by the end. When the rewards come easy after little effort, we value the reward less.
Therefore, we have the highest chances of disrespecting the reward in the first place and give up the advantage and gift that we’ve been given. Slow and steady wins the race because we know just how much effort it takes to win the race.
Everyone’s competing to win the race and every one of us are formidable competitors. We earn our spot in the world, one day at a time.
Slow and Steady Wins the Race: 9 Reasons Why
Below are the 9 reasons why slow and steady wins the race. The slow and steady keep their wins and successes throughoug their lives.
1) Big Accomplishments Happen Over Time
The biggest goal that I have is to be a millionaire. It’s not a matter of if I’ll get there, it’s a matter of when. However, I’m the last one to say that it’ll come easy. I’m at $500k at age 28 right now and it’s taken many sacrifices to get here. Seven years in the making.
Will I ever take a 50/50 risk to see if I can get to $1mil or $0? Never. Because I appreciate the risks and sacrifices it took for me to get here in the first place. No one who ever became successful got there by starting at the top. Everyone had to figure out their problems and challenges and overcome them.
Slow and steady wins the race because great accomplishments happen over time. Over years and even decades of effort. There’s also many setbacks and challenges that happen throughout the years as well. Competition is not easy. Everyone’s competing for what you want.
That’s why it takes time and effort to figure everything out.
2) Slow and Steady Wins the Race Because of Proper Risk Management
It was December 2021. I felt like I was on top of the world because we were coming off from one of the best bull markets the history of the world’s ever seen. Another company also gave me a 30% pay increase. Not only was my net worth healthy, but my income was as well!
Therefore, I felt like I was on top of the world. Then I started taking more risks with my investments than usual. Then the bear market of 2022 hit. We all know the end of the story. I ended up losing $150k+ in just a single year, alone.
Slow and steady wins the race because we appreciate what we earned. Therefore, we take appropriate risks to grow our money. A slow and steady 8%/yr returns is better than making 100% returns one year, only to lose everything by the end.
Risk management is more important than anyone realizes. It’s not “amazing” but it gets the job done.
3) Emotional Management
When we win a huge win, emotions get into our head. We start thinking what a great job we did and how great are we to earn that huge win! That’s letting our emotions get the better of us. Emotions are the biggest enemy in business.
Then we start making not the soundest of decisions and let emotions take over our lives. Instead of our rational decision making skills. Euphoria is what causes people to take irrational decisions that ruin their lives. It only takes one bad decision for the domino to start.
Slow and steady wins the race because when we control our own pace, we figure out how to beat the race at our option. There’s no outside forces that controls and influences what we feel. We are in control of our own lives at that point.
High emotions ruined many people’s lives.
4) We Appreciate Our Earnings More
A 9-5 job teaches us just how hard it is to transfer money from someone else’s pocket to our own. For great reason, too. They can’t give away their hard-earned money to someone else who didn’t earn the money. It’s their hard earned money, too.
Slow and steady wins the race because we appreciate the time and effort it took to earn the dollars. Therefore, we smartly deploy our capital that’ll earn us even more money. Instead of risking everything on 1 YOLO play that may or may not work out.
Not only does it take effort to realize the fruits of our efforts, it takes time as well. A lot of time. And time is the most valuable resource we hold. You may have to even figure out how to get over burnout from work. We don’t appreciate anything that was handed to us on a silver platter.
We appreciate rewards that we worked hard to build, achieve, and earn.
5) Lottery Winners Go Broke
70% of lottery winners go broke in the first five years. Not only that, family members get jealous towards lottery winners’ success. They don’t think they deserve or earn the money. Therefore, they try to figure out a way to transfer their money into their own pockets.
People who buy lotteries are usually bad with money. That’s why they buy lotteries in the first place, because they want to get “lucky”. We don’t get rich and wealthy from luck, we get it from making sacrifices over years and years.
Slow and steady wins the race because it takes time to learn the intricate details it takes to be successful. There are nuances and tiny adjustments we have to make to figure out how to overcome challenges. Lottery winners didn’t learn any of the small details it takes to be successful.
When we go from broke to rich that quickly, there’s a good chance we’ll go from rich to broke just as quickly, if not quicker.
6) Patience is the Most Successful Trait
Not intelligence, not good looks, but patience is the most important trait. The marshmallow test when kids who could wait for their prize had the highest chances of success. The ones who chase the hottest next stocks and cryptocurrencies got burned when Gamestop eventually went bust.
Or when their favorite cryptocurrency went bust. Slow and steady wins the race because patience is what causes a person to become successful. The hottest trends only become trends for a short period of time. It’s hard, if not impossible, to know when to cash out out of a hot trend.
What really makes the long term success are people willing to be patient for their rewards. I’ve been in the wealth building game for seven years and I already feel like I want my rewards already. I still feel like the rewards weren’t worth all of the sacrifices I made.
However, I’m still remaining patient and putting money away every paycheck so I can move up in life.
7) Slow and Steady Wins the Race because That’s How the Game is Designed
The game doesn’t reward risky and reckless behavior. The capitalism game, tax code, and laws are designed to favor patient ones who take their time to reach success. Long term capital gains are only taxed at 20% while short-term capital gains are taxed as ordinary income.
The lawmakers are trying to encourage people to demonstrate long-term thinking with the patient reaping the rewards. Slow and steady wins the race because the lawmakers literally design the game as such. There are short-term thinkers who do win.
However, there are even more winners who are long-term thinkers. It’s not a good idea to fight the ones who design the game in the first place. It’s a much more enjoyable ride to take advantage of the laws that’s written instead of trying to write a completely new game yourself.
Slow and steady wins the race because the game favors the slow and steady.
8) We Control Our Results
Instead of tripping and falling through the journey by increasing our speed, slow and steady wins the race because we control the pace ourselves. It’s dangerous when someone else controls how fast we reach our goals. Because our mind can’t keep up with the fast pace.
We like it when we control when we get into relationships, get a job, and start investing. When we lose our sense of control, everything falls apart. When we don’t feel like we are in control of our own destiny and our own lives, we don’t feel like our actions are our own.
It doesn’t matter whether the results are positive. If the speed and the pace of the results are unexpected, we don’t know how to react. There’s a reason why tennis players want to return the ball as fast as possible to their opponents. It’s to throw their opponents off.
We don’t want our competitors to control our results, we want to control the results ourselves.
9) Time Works For Us Instead of Against Us
The test of time is what matters in this world in determining long term quality. Slow and steady wins the race because it still gives us progress. When we progress forwards, onwards, and upwards, it’s just a matter of time before we reach our destination.
It feels bad to know that time is working against us, when we’re racing against the clock to make our dreams a reality. It means that no matter what actions you take, the best case scenario is that you are delaying the inevitable. I felt it in 2022 when the bear market was causing me to lose money hand over fist.
No matter what I tried to do, nothing worked. It didn’t matter whether I made more money, how much money I kept putting into the market, nothing. It didn’t matter. I was just doomed to lose more money the day, week, or month after.
However, when we try to slowly but surely make progress, it doesn’t seem so hopeless after all.
Use the Slow and Steady Wins the Race to Your Advantage
The impatient will always be destroyed by the patient. Slow and steady wins the race because only the patient ones are willing to run the race at a pace they are comfortable with. When you use this principle to your advantage, everything works out in the end.
Any time I tried to rush my results, it ended up badly. I tried to rush an interview process and the interviewer just flat out rejected me on the spot thereafter. I tried to rush my job applications because I was working at a horrible workplace and ended up getting a horrible offer.
When I took my time and rejected companies I didn’t think was right for me, I got the job offer of a lifetime eventually. Your life is a marathon and not a sprint and the ones who sprint are more prone to getting injuries along the race.
Slow and steady wins the race because your life is long. It’s a way to live to tell another day because some battles just aren’t worth fighting. Nor are they worth your attention. There’ll be many distractions along the way and you will have to make an infinite number of decisions for your life.
Take your time to decide what’s right for you. The one who wins wars isn’t the one who makes quick decisions and adjusts as time passes. It’s the one who strategizes and comes up with a winning strategy and then attacks their enemy, while making adjustments along the way.
There’s no need to rush anything. Your life is a long game.
Slow and Steady Wins the Race: 9 Reasons Why Shortlist
- Big accomplishments happen over time
- Slow and steady wins the race because of proper risk management
- Emotional management
- We appreciate our earnings more
- Lottery winners go broke
- Patience is the most successful trait
- Slow and steady wins the race because that’s how the game is designed
- We control our results
- Time works for us instead of against us
