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If You Rush, You Won’t Finish
Solzhenitsyn thought that:
“A man who’s in a hurry won’t live to see the end of his stretch. He’ll tire and soon be done for.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
If you are in a hurry, if you’re impatient, if you’re hasty, Solzhenitsyn thought that you’d actually live a shorter life, or at the very least that you would burn out and not finish whatever the project is that you started. Why could that be? Part of the reason, at least, is because of burnout. If you’re not patient, what you’re prone to do is work a bit too hard. You might think: how the hell could someone possibly work too hard if you have a noble goal in life?
The simple answer is that it’s not sustainable. Let’s take a gym example. If you start on January 1st getting up at 5 am, and you go to the gym for an hour and a half, you don’t eat until noon, you intermittent fast, you eat a salad for lunch, you have a protein shake, you stretch in the evening, you don’t eat anything after 8 PM, you go to bed early… that’s a Class A schedule.
But how sustainable is that for someone who only just recently hit snooze 20 times before crawling out of bed, going to work, coming home, ordering a pizza, and watching TV all night? It’s not sustainable. It’s not realistic. It’s too much too soon.
