Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, with your host Joe Bautista. In this podcast, my goal is to give you quick lessons that you can reflect on in your journal so you can grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually and have a better career, better relationships, and better personal finances while you enjoy your morning cup of coffee.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones. I’m also the founder of Grow With Joe, where I combine self-development coaching and financial planning for Latino Professionals.
In today’s episode, we are going to discuss how it takes time to build up our skills, and how we shouldn’t be frustrated by taking things slowly. After I finished Marine Corps boot camp, it was time to go to Marine Combat Training before going to MOS school to learn to become a Supply Administrator. In the Marines, they want everyone to learn how to rifleman. So you spend about a month learning how to use a compass in the mountains of California, how to use various weapons, how to clear a room, and we went on a lot of hikes.
And my combat instructors started preaching, smooth is fast, slow is smooth. They realized that we weren’t going to be perfect with the training in the beginning, and it was best to do things slowly first and build up the skill until you can start doing it faster. When you first try to go through a window to clear a house in one of the training facilities, it’s going to be awkward.
You’re trying to figure out just to get through the window with all your gear and then from there, you have to clear all the rooms while you’re communicating with your team. We definitely did it sloppy and it wasn’t fast. If I had to do that in a real-time situation for the first time, I would definitely have failed.
I feel like my Marine Corps training has helped me have the right perspective with my life after the Marines and especially with my business. As a business owner, I have to do a lot of things myself when it comes to doing financial planning, marketing, bookkeeping, sales, and a whole bunch of other things.
It is not smooth at all in the beginning, but I just tell myself that I don’t need to be great to get started, I just need to get started to become great. When it came to building up my e-mail marketing, it was very slow and I made a lot of mistakes, but now I’m a lot better at it.
Trying to make things perfect is a great way to fail in life. It’s best just to fumble your way through things slowly so that you can build up your skills and better see the patterns in the environment. This is why smooth is fast, slow is smooth. Going slow at first will allow you to go smoothly in that activity that you’re doing. Then the next time around, you can go a little bit faster. Then the next time, it will be a little bit better. Then all of a sudden, you’re going as fast as you can and it will look so smooth to an outsider.
When I try something new, I will get frustrated but I won’t allow it to hold me back. I will just try again and then try again. I’ve done a lot of things where if I was to tell my 12-year-old self that he was going to do all these things in the future like dance, speak in front of crowds, and record videos every day to promote his business, he probably wouldn’t have believed me. But I just see that if someone else did something, I can do something similar, but I have to be smooth, and to be smooth, I have to take things slow and build myself up to mastery.
That’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, smooth is fast, slow is smooth. Remember this Marine Corps saying when you’re going through something new. Realized that it will take time but with enough persistence, you will get better at that task. One thing I sucked at in the Marines was doing front body rolls for the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program. In boot camp, I failed miserably at this move and the drill instructors laughed at me, but then in the fleet, I had more time to practice them and I eventually got better at them. I guess this gave me a lot of confidence to do other things. I just have to be willing to fail and this is the mindset to have. Realize that failure is not fatal and you can live another day. Do this and you will be the master that you need to be to get control over your life.
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