Too many people ignore that the slow and steady wins the race. It is human nature to want things now. When we don’t get what we want when we want it, we feel discomfort. We have to take deliberate steps to break free from this evolutionary advantage that was helpful in the past but not in the present.
I get it. You saw a WallStreetBets video showing a trader winning $6 million in one year and think, “if he can do it, why can’t I?”. If you can be successful at it, by all means. However, for every one person who became a millionaire in one year, there are millions of people who didn’t become a millionaire in one year.
That’s a one in one million chance. Do you really want to risk your life and hard work to be that one person in a million? The odds aren’t just stacked against you. The odds are obscenely stacked against you. Never mind the fact that the poster could have been lying. There’s another way to be a millionaire.
In almost a guaranteed way. There’s really no true guarantee when it comes to investing. However, this is just about as the most guaranteed way in order go be a millionaire. And that’s by playing the slow and steady game because this wins the race. I’ve been buying index funds ever since I graduated.
In college, I played around with day trading here and there. However, where I made the big money is when I played the long game. After graduation, I started seeing my investing horizon over decades and not over months and that’s when doors opened up.
Do I still have moonshot bets in my portfolio? Absolutely. However, they are very much in the minority and very insignificant.
What Does Slow and Steady Wins the Race Mean?
Slow and steady wins the race means that the one who steadily progresses forward, onward, and upwards will eventually win in the long run. In the short run, anything can happen. The tortoise may be ahead, the hare may be ahead. However, in the long run, anything can happen.
This is exactly how casinos think. They know in the short run, some people are going to outperform and win money. In the long run, they are supposed to win, an obscene amount of money, at that. They don’t try to have an outburst of win at one point. They’re patient and try to win over a long period of time.
In fact, a reported instance where they tried to win quickly ended up backfiring. Don Johnson, a famous gambler, took the casinos to the cleaners by winning $15MM from them. All because the casinos weren’t patient and they had to offer him perks that ended up working against them in favor.
This doesn’t just apply to money and building wealth. It also applies to everyday life and all aspects. You don’t break your back trying to become Vice President of the company straight from graduation. You start from the bottom and slowly build up to your success over the years.
Otherwise you will be burned out in about 2 – 3 years of continuous work. Over someone who took their time and became Vice President in 5 – 7 years. Many investment bankers end up taking a pay cut even though they started out at a $150k salary straight out of school. They didn’t understand slow and steady wins the race.
Why Does Slow and Steady Win the Race?
My blog is a slow and steady wins the race play. I don’t have a very high spike in traffic from one month over another. I get help from readers like you who SMASHES the social share button and posting to your favorite social media! It would help me out a lot and I would greatly appreciate it, if so.
So with that said let’s go over the reasons why it is a winning strategy.
1) Controlled Risk
The ones who try to win big in a short amount of time take an unhealthy and obscene amount of risk. The thing about risk is that just as it can work for you, it can very well work against you. These people ignore the downside risk and end up losing even what they started with.
Slow and steady wins the race because it avoids uncontrollable risk. It’s a healthy amount of risk where consistent upward mobility is achieved. You don’t try to get a person to fall in love with you by buying an entire mansion for them. Love is earned day by day, brick by brick. Interaction by interaction.
A consistent 7 – 10% increase every year is worth the weight in gold. You don’t try to build muscle by going to the gym and working out for 18 hours. You build muscle by slowly and steadily putting in effort. If you work out for 18 hours in a single day, you risk the effort backfiring on you.
2) Reversion to the Mean
Most results have a way to revert back to the mean. Outlandish gains aren’t sustainable. A company recently gave me a job offer that will be a 30% increase in compensation. I know that I’m not going to get a 30% increase in compensation next year and trying to get the increase in compensation will be too risky for my career.
I built my career through the slow and steady wins the race principle. Starting salary was $52,500 salary straight out of college. In five+ years, I more than tripled the income. The important thing is that I did not triple my income over a single year. That would have come with so much expectations that I couldn’t fulfill.
Most progress increases revert to the mean eventually over the long term. Otherwise, there’d be more trillionaires and billionaires out in the world. But there aren’t. Every day is not a win. We lose some and we win some. What matters is what happens to the results over a long period of time. That’s the real measure of progress.
3) No Emotional Outbursts
If you ever lost money gambling, you know the emotional thrill, happiness, and joy you feel from winning money in the short term. For doing absolutely nothing but just putting money on the betting area. The ones who feel the emotional thrill have the hardest time walking away from the table because emotions consume them.
Slow and steady wins the race because emotions are taken out of the equation. When you double every two weeks, you feel euphoria. When you increase by maybe 10% every paycheck, you don’t feel that much different. It’s just another day and you punch the clock just like any other regular day.
Emotions are the hardest things that we can control and one of the most impossible things we can control. It’s as if something else beyond our control controls it, whether it’s our inner psyche, subconscious, or anything else that we don’t control. Therefore, taking the emotions out of the process is crucial.
Things to Be Slow and Steady to Win the Race on
So now that you know why slow and steady wins the race, what should you try to be slow and steady on?
1) Building Wealth
This is hands down, easily the best category to apply the slow and steady wins the race principle on. All you have to do is invest your money in a broad market based index fund consistently over time and watch your net worth skyrocket. As always, when it comes to investing, nothing is guaranteed.
I get it. It’s painful to watch a big chunk of your paycheck go to the markets every two weeks. Not on things that you want to spend money on. But on the market that gives you no instant gratification at all whatsoever. You will have to be a bit of a mindless zombie while doing it.
Once the money is invested in the market, treat it as if you no longer own it. As if the money didn’t exist in the first place. Once you forget about it and move on to the rest of the things in your life, doors open up. About 20% of my income goes straight to the stock market.
Although it’s painful seeing the money go out the door, I know one day it’ll be worth it.
2) Maintaining Weight
You don’t try to lose 10 pounds in a single day. Not only is that unhealthy, it will eat at your psyche. You try to lose 10 pounds over 1 – 6 months. If you do lose 10 pounds in a single day, there’s something wrong with your body. Our body uses up approximately 2,000 calories in a day.
There are roughly 3,500 calories in a pound of body fat. While it’s not exact, that means you roughly lost 35,000 calories from your body in a single day if you lose 10 pounds in a single day. That’s not healthy. That can only happen if there was something wrong.
Slow and steady wins the race. A steady diet and exercise regime would help you lose 10 pounds easily over 1 – 6 months. These days, I can lose weight without any discomfort at all whatsoever because I found the recipe for losing a specific amount of pounds over a specific period of time.
It took time but I employ the slow and steady method in losing weight as well.
3) Building Muscle
The ones who quickly built muscle in a week are not doing it through healthy means. It takes time for your muscles to adapt to the physical demands you have to go through. Our body isn’t built in a single day. it takes constant nurturing and consistent effort in order to build muscle.
Even if you frequent the gym every day for 3 hours a day, it’s still not enough to build muscle in a week. When you want to build muscle, slow and steady wins the race. Diet is just as important as exercise and it takes meticulous effort and planning in order to build muscle and gain strength.
Going to the gym 3 – 4 times a week combined with a steady diet regime of protein is a great cookbook recipe to get there.
4) Emotional Control
This is the hardest aspect of your life that you will have to figure out some way to control. Many people still let their ego, pride, and emotions get the better of them. Especially when they are in their early 20’s. When we are young is when we have the most to prove ourselves to the world.
The world doesn’t know what we are capable of yet so we try our hardest in order to prove others wrong. So then we get insecure whenever someone else better comes along. Emotional control is letting go of all of the need to prove to others anything. The real accomplished people in their older years don’t need to do any of that.
It may take decades to successfully recognize when emotions are getting in the way of progress and success. As long as you put in consistent effort, you will get there eventually. Slow and steady wins the race. I know that it took me at least 8 years in order to successfully control my emotions.
5) Building Friendships
Remember that the goal of networking is to build genuine friendships between one another. Genuine friendships take time to completely seal the deal and nurture. Slow and steady wins the race in building relationships and genuine friendships with people. It doesn’t happen overnight.
Sure, you build relationships based on mutual interests and wants, but that’s a basic necessity. The bigger necessity is are your values between your friends matched up. Do you respect and like one another? Are you trying to get something out of the other person? Whatever it is, it takes time.
The best friends that I have today didn’t happen overnight. We are compatible with goals and the way that we treat each other. We disagree on certain subjects but we don’t disagree from each other in such a bad way that it leaves a bad taste in the other’s mouth. Friendships take time to develop.
Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Don’t Overdo It
When you try to go too big too soon, you are setting yourself up for success. You have to make sure to take breaks along the way. I learned that the hard way. I went too hard in a short burst amount of time that I have health problems that I’m paying for. My eyesight is horrible and my neck and shoulders hurt every day.
Even though I try to remedy the situation, none of the remedies worked and I’m living with the fact that this may be a permanent loss. This is because I overdid everything when I was younger. I played tennis when I was in high school, sometimes for 10+ hours at a time. However, I never stretched afterwards because i was young.
I didn’t understand that slow and steady wins the race. By jam packing all of the effort in a short amount of time and my muscles are paying the price for it. There isn’t enough money in the world to compensate for my naivety and misunderstanding of my limits and capabilities.
Instead of trying to increase 50% in a single year, look to increase 25% one year and 25% the next year. You have your whole life ahead of you. People seem to forget that our life is long. We have PLENTY of time in the world to do everything that we want to do before we leave it.
You don’t build your life by trying to create the entire house on day one. You start off with the foundational bricks and eventually end up at the roof. By trying to build the entire house simultaneously, the house will be of subpar quality. Create a quality life, not a subpar life.
