I have a friend who is a financial adviser. When I first met him he was working in the “wealth management” side of a large international bank, helping wealthy clients figure out how to invest their money. Now he runs an investment fund and manages hundreds of millions of dollars. One time, back when I was still a high school teacher, I thought I’d ask if he had any reading recommendations for my students. None of them were looking for investment strategies for their millions…at least not yet. But financial literacy is a really important skill for people of almost any age, so I thought he might know some good books that taught the basics that I could pass along. He would only give me one answer:
“The Tortoise and the Hare.”
Right, I said, I get the idea. Go for the slow, steady, wise approach, not the get-rich-quick schemes. But what can you recommend that translates that to money and financial literacy? “C’mon, help me out, don’t be so clever,” I thought (but didn’t say aloud). “No, The Tortoise and the Hare. I’m serious. Internalize that, and then you can learn the details when you’re ready.” So that was the advice. Read and learn that short fable, and then some day you might be ready to manage your own money. Got it.
Strangely, it was years before I made the connection between The Tortoise and the Hare and a phrase I’ve learned from chefs: Slow Down to Speed Up. “Slow down to speed up” is a lot like “slow and steady wins the race,” except in restaurants there is no finish line—it’s the daily grind of getting good food out to customers.
Slow Down to Speed Up has to do with keeping up with the crazy pace of a kitchen by slowing down first to perfect your skills. If you’re falling behind because you’re not chopping vegetables well or you keep forgetting ingredients because you’re in a rush, then speeding up the bad preparation doesn’t make anything better. You have to slow down and do it right until doing it right becomes automatic. Then, and only then, can you start to really stay caught up.
Slow Down to Speed Up is such an integral part of chef training that Dan Charnas devotes a chapter to it in his book Everything In Its Place: The Power of Mise-en-place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind. Here’s how Charnas puts it:
Chefs don’t panic. The basic concept is this: The natural human tendency in the face of imminent deadline is to rush or panic. Don’t rush; when you rush, your movements become sloppy. Don’t panic; when you panic, you forget things. When you find yourself rushing or panicking or both, just stop. Breathe. If your anxiety compels you to move, then clean. The act of cleaning…will force you to take some breaths. Look around you. Think about where you are and where you need to be. Think of the next step to get you there and take that step, slowly.
Though I’ve only known it in the kitchen context, it turns out that Slow Down to Speed Up is a concept taught in business and management, also. Here are short articles from McKinsey & Company, Forbes, and Harvard Business Review extolling the virtues of slowing down at key moments to do better in fast-paced business.
So financial planners, chefs, and business managers agree that you should slow down to speed up. What does Slow Down to Speed Up look like for busy high school students? How can you win your college admission race by slowing down?
First, focus on skills, not achievements. Chefs slow down to make sure they’re cutting vegetables right, keeping their station clean, cooking their proteins to the best temperature. When they’re in the kitchen getting orders ready, they’re not thinking about getting great reviews or awards. Rewards only come later as a result of the skills. As a student, take time to think about the skills you’re learning and the skills you should have already learned. Think more about skills and material, less about grades and rewards. Don’t use tricks and shortcuts to get an A in Biology—learn the Biology. Don’t spend 45 minutes trying to hide that you didn’t do the History reading—spend an hour doing the History reading. Make your audition monologue the best you can, without worrying about if you’ll get the starring role in the play. Practice your passing and raise your endurance without thinking about going to the soccer playoffs. Your skills will be rewarded sooner or later, but only if you focus on the skills. The more you slow down to focus on skills, the more substantial the reward, even if it’s a little later.
Do less, practice more. Students and parents often ask me what else they should be doing to help with college applications. What other activities should they add to their resume? How can they “round out” their application? Unless they’re doing absolutely nothing (and they never are), my answer is always not to do more. Go for quality, not quantity. Do fewer things, and practice them much more intensely. A student who plays one sport and is in one club, but participates with intention and experiences growth, will always be more appealing than a student who superficially participates in three sports and five clubs. This isn’t about “finding your passion.” If you have a passion, great. Spend more time practicing it. But if you don’t have a passion yet, that’s fine. Choose a few things that are good and worthwhile, and practice them with care and attention. It’s not about the passion, it’s about the practice.
Study a little more, cram a lot less. Set up a regular time to study and do homework. Ideally it’s daily, but that’s not always realistic. Then, use that time to study and do homework, all the time, even if there’s nothing big coming up. If there truly is nothing you need to do during that study time, use it anyway. Be in your study space and do something productive. Read ahead in a textbook, or read something for pleasure. The better you get about spreading your preparation for projects and exams out over time, the less panic you experience right before the big due dates.
Procrastinate better. Maybe I’m supposed to tell you not to procrastinate, but that would be naive. People procrastinate. But you can do it better.
There’s a good chance you’re like me: when I’m overwhelmed with too much to do or anxious because I’m not sure what to do next, I soothe myself by doing something low-stress and of low importance. Ironically, the more I have on my to-do list, the more likely I am to waste time. It’s a self-soothing mechanism. So if I really need to get back to a client, and I’m behind on writing a blog post, and I need to return some email, and there’s laundry piling up, and my kids are insisting on eating dinner (they seem to want dinner every night!), I find myself looking for a time waster. Twitter, Instagram, online shopping, re-organizing the bookshelves, things like that. It temporarily helps with the stress, but it makes the problem worse. The next time you catch yourself procrastinating, ask yourself if maybe you’re doing it because you’re anxious about what all you have to do and being unsure what to do next. Just understanding why you procrastinate is a major step.
The trick is to procrastinate with finite distractions, not open-ended distractions. Cleaning is a good distraction, because it makes it easier to feel in control. But clean something small; clean your desk, or make your bed. Don’t reorganize all the files in your computer or decide to overhaul your bedroom. When you’re in a procrastinating mood, stay away from the internet. Play a short and simple game, not one that takes hours. If you can procrastinate with something that’s time-limited and healthy, even better. Take a walk around the block. Do 25 push-ups. Stretch. Do a 10-minute guided meditation. Then, after a short procrastination break, take a breath, “think about where you are and where you need to be. Think of the next step to get you there and take that step, slowly.”
Sleep. It’s hard to get enough sleep as a busy teenager. It’s hard to get enough sleep as a busy adult. It’s a paradoxical circle, where you need to get sleep so you can be organized, calm, healthy, and happy. And you also need to finish all the things that an organized, calm, healthy, happy person does before you can get enough sleep. So I’m not going to get preachy or judge about sleep. I will recommend, however, choosing one night a week to become your regular “sleep night.” Choose one night a week—it doesn’t even have to be the same night each week—where you do everything within your power to get one hour of sleep more than you usually get. Maybe that will be a struggle. Maybe that will feel good. And maybe it will be so good that you’re able to increase it to three, four, or five nights a week. If that’s the case, reverse it and have a single designated “stay up late to catch up” night.
Slowing down to speed up is tough, especially at first. When you’re panicked about having too much to do, being in a chaotic state, and having pressures build up around you, stopping is one of the hardest things to do. But just like the chefs, just like the business gurus and fund managers, just like the tortoise—you have to slow down and plod along. Slow and steady is how you win the race, and it’s how you prepare yourself for college.
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