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 nothing less becoming in a well-trained leader than haste and rashness.” His favorite sayings were: “More haste, less speed”; “Better a safe commander than a bold”; and “That is done quickly enough which is done well enough.”

The first one is rendered simply enough 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 that 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… and you’ll actually go faster… and better.

P.S. This was originally sent on July 16, 2020. Sign up today for the Daily Stoic’s email and get our popular free 7-day course on Stoicism.