Quick Fixes Lead to Slow Breakdowns

The microwave was invented in 1946 by radar engineers and provided homes with a shortcut for cooking and warming up food. Email allowed messages to transfer instantaneously across the world and provided a short cut for communication. Although these innovations work amazingly well and have enhanced efficiency in our daily lives, shortcuts and quick fixes are rarely the answer. In fact, they generally do more harm than good as they distract from the path we should be following. Yet, we remain enchanted and mesmerized by the mirage of the quick fix.

According to multiple research sources, the diet pill industry is a $70 billion dollar a year industry.  To put that into perspective, if you were to stack $100 bills flat on top of one another, $70 billion would create a stack nearly 45 miles high. How is this possible when the mystery of weight loss is no secret at all? We know that all we have to do to lose weight is eat a little less and move a little more, but I guess that just takes too long. Someone spends 20 years treating their body like a garbage disposal, cramming in any and every kind of junk they can find, and then is frustrated when they can’t reverse that damage in 20 days of diet and exercise?!? So, they turn to some kind of magic diet pill, maybe a mix of “secret” botanical extracts from a region of China we’ve never heard of, extracted from a plant we can’t pronounce and that hasn’t even been tested on animals.

People are so unwilling to play the long game and patiently execute tried-and-true that they will turn to almost anything as an alternative. This isn’t just in health and fitness either, it’s the quest for the get-rich-quick, home run stock rather than living within one’s means and diligently saving, it’s looking for the perfect phrase to close more sales instead of knocking on more doors, it’s seeking the breakthrough parenting technique from the Nobel Prize winning child psychologist, it’s in almost every important area of our lives.

The phrase, “slow and steady wins the race” isn’t just for bunnies racing reptiles. We are surrounded by “hares” darting this way and that, chasing the elusive quick fix, but we can’t allow ourselves to be caught up by their distraction. Continue to play the long game, because, no matter how many times you read The Tortoise and the Hare, the tortoise wins. Every. Single. Time.