Apply the Tao Te Ching in practice

Author: Hu Weihong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: A person who is eager for quick success is not fit to be a master. True masters are those who can overcome the fear of slowness and achieve their life goals step by step. Ximen Chuixue practiced swordsmanship by drawing his sword ten thousand times a day. He used a slow method to become a legendary master. This is a fictional story from martial arts novels. Leonardo da Vinci learned painting by drawing simple objects like eggs for three years. He used a slow method to become a master of the art. This is a real story from history. The wise teach: Great things take time. Laozi said: Valuable things and great achievements are accomplished slowly. The key to success is to overcome the fear of slowness and gradually grasp your dreams. Don’t fantasize about quick success without effort, for its value is questionable: Hormone-injected fast-growing pigs are both nutritionally poor and harmful to health; half-baked skills learned in quick courses look good but don’t work; last-minute cramming for exams only creates high scores but low ability; rushed construction built late at night can truly be deadly.
Although life has already taught us many lessons, some people still refuse to believe in the truth: Others need to be late bloomers, but I don’t. Why? Because I’m smarter, or at least more intelligent than others. They spend every day looking for shortcuts to skip the hard work of practice and achieve their life goals faster than others. The shortcuts they find are gambling, buying lottery tickets, and doing things that break the rules. Their justification is: A horse won’t get fat without night grass, and a person won’t get rich without windfall wealth. True wisdom knows that success comes from gradual accumulation and gradual understanding. As the famous American columnist Charles Kuralt said: Opportunities for greatness don’t rush down like the Niagara Falls but drip slowly and steadily. Faster can only be achieved through more effort, and the idea that gold can be won without sweat is full of fantasy.
Why can’t some people overcome the fear of slowness? They believe that this is an era of the fast fish eating the slow fish, where the faster you achieve your goals, the more likely you are to win. So they race against time, rushing to speed up, and are always eager for quick success. But they ignore a fact: speed and slowness depend on many factors, and speed is just one of them. The same applies to doing things and building a career—pursuing speed alone is useless. To move faster, we need to spend time choosing direction and methods; we must pay attention to every detail, as slow work produces fine results; we must follow the principle of wait three minutes but never rush a second. Successful and enduring entrepreneurs often use very slow methods. When McDonald’s decided whether to invest in China, they spent three years conducting market research. They knew that a correct direction is always more important than speed. Japanese business god Konosuke Matsushita proposed the philosophy of water management in business, high-quality, low-price products to make them accessible to everyone. He knew that the key to how fast you make money is sales volume, not profit margins.
We know that driving an unlicensed car won’t get you into Beijing, but riding a bicycle might take you around the world. The outcome of speed and slowness is not simply determined by speed. Often, the reason for falling behind is not that the opponent is too fast or that we are too slow, but that we often stand still. So, the wise teach: Don’t fear slowness, but fear stagnation. As long as you maintain uniform linear motion and everything goes smoothly, even walking might be faster than flying.