The Tortoise and The Hare

…the tortoise would have never won, despite the hare’s complacency.

What was the moral of the story of the tortoise and the hare? If we had considered the blunder of the hare, we may have learnt that we should never be complacent. On the other hand, the tortoise’s determination engendered the proverbial “slow and steady wins the race”. Yet, if we consider the story from a different angle, we can gain some insight about what I consider to be the most crucial concept in self-improvement — the growth mindset.

The tortoise never should have been able to win the race. What made his win possible? While the hare only lost because he was complacent, the tortoise only won because he did not stop. If he had stopped and given up after the hare got so far ahead he was out of sight, the tortoise would have never won, despite the hare’s complacency.

So why didn’t the tortoise stop? Did he genuinely believe that he could win? He couldn’t have been sure that the hare would stop and fall asleep, or that the hare would sleep long enough for the tortoise to win. I believe that to the tortoise, it was never a race. I think the reason the tortoise did not stop was because he wanted to prove that no matter how much slower than the hare he was, as long as he kept going, he too, could reach the finish line, just like the hare.

Becoming unstoppable is the secret ingredient to a growth mindset

An unstoppable object moving towards a destination will always reach the destination, no matter how mind-numbingly, excruciatingly slow it is moving.

If it was never about a race or a competition to the tortoise, we should also stop reflecting on the story as if it were a race. What the tortoise really wanted to teach us was that no matter how slow your progress, as long as you don’t stop, you will eventually get there. This idea applies especially well to areas of personal growth, or really any area of growth where it really isn’t a race. If you’ve been trying to develop a growth mindset, this secret ingredient is perhaps the last piece of the puzzle.

People with a fixed mindset believe that their abilities are set from birth and are immutable. For instance, one would say, “I’m just so bad at math, I can’t help it!” On the other hand, people with a growth mindset believe that their inborn abilities are just a starting point, with a capacity for growth resulting from their own actions. For instance, one would instead say, “I’m bad at math, I really need to practice more.”

However, sometimes simply believing that we have a capacity for growth can be discouraging. If you wanted to increase the temperature of an ice cube, and you monitored its progress by looking at the reading on a thermometer, you might be disappointed that its temperature remains at 0°C (32°F) for a long time. That’s because when ice heats up, energy is being used to turn the ice into water — only after all the ice has melted into water will the temperature start increasing. So, if you keep staring at the thermometer, it certainly would seem that no progress is being made towards increasing the temperature. In reality, the ice is certainly melting, and you are certainly making progress towards increasing its temperature — the thermometer just can’t reflect that progress yet. Likewise, if you’re trying to lose weight, eating healthier for just a week won’t change the reading on the scale. If you’re trying to get stronger, doing pushups today probably won’t increase the number you can do tomorrow.

An unstoppable object moving towards a destination will always reach the destination, no matter how mind-numbingly, excruciatingly slow it is moving. Keep eating healthier and doing pushups for a month, and you might just lose a few pounds and double your reps. But in order to get there, for your ice cube to finish melting, you must be like the tortoise — unstoppable.

Slow and steady finishes the journey

When it comes to areas of personal growth, it should never be a race. And if it is not a race, who cares if you’re going slow?

Perhaps The Tortoise and The Hare really should have been “The Tortoise and The Other Tortoise Who Ran Too Fast, Got Tired Then Gave Up”. We’ve discussed how being unstoppable is key. However, true unstoppability is only possible with moderation. We don’t know if it was possible for the tortoise to go any faster than he did, but we do know that he went at a pace that allowed him to be unstoppable. It is much better to go at a sustainable pace long-term than to go too fast and get burnt-out in the short term. For instance, if you go from eating fast food for all three meals to eating chicken, broccoli and rice for all three meals, you likely wouldn’t have lost as much weight after six months compared to if you had just replaced one meal. While replacing all three meals is objectively more effective in helping you lose weight, it isn’t practical. You would have likely relapsed back to your old diet many times, or even completely given up along the way. Making incremental, but bearable adjustments until you eventually replaced all three meals would have been a much better strategy. Small, progressive changes are good enough, because so long as you are unstoppable, you will still reach your goals.

This echoes the Japanese concept of Kaizen, the philosophy of continuous improvement and the belief that small, incremental improvements can lead to huge impacts over time.

On my 20th birthday, I resolved to start calisthenics as a means to become and look stronger. I tracked my progress for the various exercises that I did, and one of which were pull-ups. When I first started, I could do a maximum of 5 pullups in one go. After 23 days, I could do 7 reps, which was a modest, but encouraging improvement. By Day 39, I could do 8 reps. Take a guess how many more days it took to improve by 1 more rep.

It took a mind-numbing 221 more days, until I finally managed to squeeze out that 9th rep on Day 260. For the amount of effort exerted over those 221 days, it felt unfair and frustrating that my progress was so glacial. But I think, at some point, I realized that it didn’t really matter that I wasn’t seeing results. So long as I was still training properly, I just kept believing that my ice cube was still melting.

I’m proud of the fact that I never stopped. If I had stopped, I would have ceded to the fixed mindset and started believing that my body is simply incapable of doing more than 8 pullups. And I would have been kind of right, because indeed, I would never have been able to do more than 8, for as long as I believed that it was true.

In essence, don’t judge yourself if your progress is slow or even unnoticeable. When it comes to areas of personal growth, it should never be a race. And if it is not a race, who cares if you’re going slow? The only thing that matters is being unstoppable — so unstoppable that you keep going even if you don’t see progress for 220 days.

Conclusion

The tortoise teaches us:

1. 1. Be unstoppable. So long as you are unstoppable, you will certainly reach your goal.
2. 2. The growth mindset isn’t easy. Your progress may be slow, or even unnoticeable — which is the true test of a growth mindset. But if you can maintain unstoppability, it makes your growth mindset incredibly powerful.
3. 3. Is it really a race? We’ve been able to uncover these lessons by considering that The Tortoise and The Hare was never a race. Likewise, if we recognise that areas of personal growth aren’t a race, it becomes much easier to be unstoppable, no matter how slow we are going or how much faster other people are.

It would be nice to be able to run as fast as the Hare. But as life would have it, most of the time, we can only go as fast as the Tortoise. But that’s okay. So long as we don’t stop, we’ll get there.