Slow and steady…

slow and steady wins the race.

Slow and steady…

Since childhood we read a very famous story about speedy hare who bragged about how fast he could run. Tired of hearing him boast, Slow and Steady, the tortoise, challenged him to a race. All the animals in the forest gathered to watch.

Hare ran down the road for a while and then and paused to rest. He looked back at Slow and Steady and cried out, “How do you expect to win this race when you are walking along at your slow, slow pace?”

Hare stretched himself out alongside the road and fell asleep, thinking, “There is plenty of time to relax.”

Slow and Steady walked and walked. He never, ever stopped until he came to the finish line.

The animals who were watching cheered so loudly for Tortoise, they woke up Hare.

Hare stretched and yawned and began to run again, but it was too late. Tortoise was over the line.

After that, Hare always reminded himself, “Don’t brag about your lightning pace, for slow and Steady won the race!”

I love this story because it exemplifies the key strategy for winning or attaining any type of goal in life. Not only does it reveal the timeless secrets to successfully achieving your life goals but it also outlines many of the common enemies. The amazing thing is that all our childhood we are taught stories like these but there implications are not taught or we are too little to understand them but as we grow up and face the challenges of our life, the morals of the stories enlighten us with secrets that can make our life awesome.

Arrogance can be an enemy. To the hare, there was no doubt in his mind that he had all the skills necessary to win the race. There’s being confident in your abilities and then there’s being arrogant with your abilities. The hare was arrogant with his abilities. He let his arrogance get in the way of winning the race.

I see this all the time and I’m sure you have as well. Maybe we can achieve our fitness goals for a few days, a few weeks even, or maybe for a few months. But what comes after that? Most often, we stop and end up “resting” – just like the hare. We take ourselves out of the race, because we feel that there’s plenty of time to sit around and relax. However, our health is our life. Without our health, we have no life.

 ”Health is not a race to be finished in one day or a few months. Health is a life long race that must be taken each and everyday.”

Lessons to be learned form the tortoise (because he won the race!)

•  Never give up. Even if you think you are weak, just do it.
•  Do work for fun. Don’t take any task/project, which you think will bore you. Have fun while doing stuff.
•  Always follow the right path, shortcuts don’t lead to victory.
•  Play the game for the games sake only. First do the desired job then think about the rewards.
•  Nothing is “out of your league” you just have to believe in yourself.
•  Keep your goals in your mind and keep on struggling to achieve them.
•  Your destination/endpoint should be very clear to you.
•  Don’t be afraid of any tasks the life puts in front of you, rather welcome it.
•  The tortoise shows us, that maximum effort is not needed to achieve our goals, just constant effort.
•  Don’t make excuses.
•  You’re responsible for your own actions. Did it matter to the tortoise what the hare did? No. Did the hare lose the race because of what the tortoise did? No. We are responsible for winning or losing due to our own actions – not the actions of others.
• Don’t sell yourself short. Imagine if you were the tortoise. Would you even take up the challenge to begin with? Maybe you’d feel as if you didn’t have a chance to win the race and wouldn’t even try? How often do you sell yourself short before you even have a chance to compete?

Do you look at yourself in the mirror at your body and tell yourself that there’s no way you’ll ever “finish” the race? That you’ll never get the body    you desire and wish? Imagine if the tortoise told himself that he’d never win the race because the hare was so much faster than him. He’d probably never even give himself a chance if he let that get to him.

Just be consistent in whatever you do, everything would work fine God willing. I have found this to be very useful in creating a writing habit, a reading habit(120 pages a day baby ), in creating a workout habit and soon other things too.

Wins the race…

Are you more like the tortoise or the hare?