Making haste slowly

I was looking for a picture to go with this blog post, searched "beginning", and was presented with page after page of different sorts of appeals to action. The implication being that beginning starts when you do something. It goes with the agile zeitgeist of "fail fast" and "safe to fail" experiments. it does raise the question, though, "in pursuit of what?"

"Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen."

Epictetus

There are ideas that blossom and fade in a month, and others that have in them the seeds of decades of contribution. We have got accustomed to the former when we need the latter.

I have a great deal of time for Johnnie Moore's work on the unhurried approach. There is a part that precedes action, the plucking of Epictetus's fig, and we need to respect that.

Our business emphasis on performance and returns in measurable form…