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Slow is smooth, smooth is fast: Navy SEALs' efficiency secret
- desktopninja 2y agoHave long stood by this belief and still do but modern IT calls it legacy and antiquated. Oh how we've lost The Plot.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoThe modern attitude is discard everything "old", not immediately understood, and abandon standardization and simplicity.
- borski 2y agoEh, I don’t think that’s true. I think you’ve just had bad experiences, and that that can definitely be true in pockets. For example, I am exceptionally happy that we have standardized on OpenAPI documentation and/or the self-documenting nature of GraphQL (where used) rather than WSDLs and the other ancient nonsense. I’m also glad we’ve mostly progressed from SAML to OAuth2/OIDC/JWT. Sure, SAML still exists but it’s definitely on its way out, once the enterprises of yesteryear eventually switch. I don’t know if you’ve ever built a SAML application and/or IdP, but it’s awful. Sometimes “old” is just worse.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoYou're cherry-picking technologies. I'm talking about people. Yes, I have. Krb5, LDAP, OAuth2, CAS, and SAML 1 & 2. XML sucks but sometimes you have to pee with bits you have rather than remake the entire world all at once with a utopian panacea.
- borski 2y agoOh, of course - if you have no other options you go with what you have. But if you have other options, I think too many people are also stuck in “I know what I know and I know it will work” and will happily kludge along while something else is sitting right next to them, better for the job. Neither extreme works.
- mangamadaiyan 2y agoI agree. I'd go further and say that the modern attitude is to discard everything "old", regardless of whether it is understood or not.
- al_borland 2y agoI can only hope this is cyclical, like most other things. Eventually organizations will reach a breaking point and realize if they want reliability, stability, and longevity, they need to slow down and do things the right way. At least I hope that’s the case. It doesn’t seem like the current pace can or should be maintained. It produces so much throw away junk.
- leptons 2y agoI think I can relate to this. I have a lot of projects that are time-sensitive. An event is coming up and I have a big project to do for it. The event is on a specific date, and there is no pushing that date back, it's a hard-stop. Moving a bit slower at first and focusing on the essentials and doing them well helps me move faster towards the end when I start to focus on smaller details.
- singleshot_ 2y agoI have a hard time believing that this phraseology originated in the military given its historical use in the motorsports community. See Alain Proust, who professed to embody this philosophy. Granted the SEAL community predated Prousts F1 participation, but SeAL tactics were not top of mind in 80s popular culture like they are today.
- tracerbulletx 2y agoFestina lente.
- dano 2y agoThank you! I love the history of this phrase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festina_lente https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festina_lente
- apeescape 2y agoAlain Prost* Marcel Proust is the famous writer. But yes, it would be interesting to learn about the origin of this phrase.
- observationist 2y agoIt's a marksmanship maxim, extant during Vietnam, gaining ground in any profession or activity where the principle made sense. SEALs definitely embraced it, but I believe it originated in WWII in its modern form. There are all sorts of regional proverbs and teachings and sayings all over the world going back through history capturing the same basic notion, though. Haste makes waste - British Festina lente - Latin (Make haste slowly) Chi va piano, va sano e va lontano - Italian (Slow and steady wins the race) Slowly but surely - many cultures, probably dates back to hunter gatherers. "Slow is smooth, smooth is quick, quick is fast" is the variation I was taught by a military relative. He was a Richard Marcinko fanboi, too, but I don't know if that's related. They all circle a notion we internalize with particular meaning that the words don't ever quite capture, perfectly, but we get the point across.
- 2y ago
- lubujackson 2y ago"Pants on fire" startups would do well to learn from this... a whole lot less stress and better results vs. slamming out midnight patches.
- borski 2y agoSometimes urgency does matter; for example, when I ran Tinfoil, we got a lot of good press from being the first ones to release a public vulnerability checker for things like Heartbleed and so on, and it was a common reason we made sales. Getting those out within 12-24h was an intentional part of our model, because our competition would take a week, so it was trivial to make them look bad. That said, it was extremely important for it to be correct, so we never cut corners. Best way to never make a sale is to tell someone they are patched when they’re not. But speed can be a major factor sometimes. It just can’t be the only factor.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- SkyPuncher 2y agoI think your example is largely a good, valid reason to move fast. It’s a short lived, time sensitive event with clear outcomes and low ambiguity. The problem comes when you’re tackling large, ambiguous problems.
- borski 2y agoYes, agreed completely. “All hands on deck” can work really well for time sensitive things like this, but… it has to end relatively quickly, there must be a reprieve afterward (celebrate, take a day off, something), and it can’t happen all the time. If it happens all the time, nobody will pay any attention to it when it actually matters.
- jameshart 2y ago‘Slow is smooth, smooth is fast’ is a mantra about how to go fast. I’ve heard it in a number of contexts - racing drivers use it, so do woodworkers, so do musicians. None of the people using it are trying to tell you to not try to get things done fast. Speed is still the goal, it’s just about the approach you take in how you act moment to moment, while trying to get things done fast.
- annoyingnoob 2y agoI learned this in racing school.
- dbg31415 2y agoI remember my dad saying this since the early 80s at least. He was in the service in the 60s. He would also say, “If you’re in a hurry, then you don’t have time to rush!”
- tunesmith 2y agoMy mom would always say, "the hurrieder I go, the behinder I get!" It might have been on a cat poster or something.
- iwontberude 2y agoThe brakes on the car help it to get around the track faster.
- readthenotes1 2y ago- I'd be curious if the origin is really the Navy seals. I couldn't find in my brief searching any where else... - I like John Wooden's saying "be quick but don't hurry". I mentioned that to a doctor who trained in the mid 20th century and he said that surgeons had a line "hurry, but don't rush"
- electric_mayhem 2y agoI don’t have an authoritative source but a mentor of mine who was a navy seal has trotted out those exact words quite frequently over the years.
- christophilus 2y agoMy brother got it from the Army. It’s pretty ubiquitous.
- raphman 2y agoQuick observations: - several people here mention that they learned this phrase in the military - the first written mention I could find is in a 1998 army report [0] - the first Google Books hit for this phrase is from 1970 but this seems to be an error - the full text preview is from a different, recent book [1] - Internet Archive has a lot of hits - but the earliest ones - except for the army report mentioned above - are from the 2000s (don't be fooled by wrong publishing dates in the metadata) [2] - Google Ngram Viewer shows a brief appearance around 1980 (maybe a fluke) and then a steady rise in the 2000s [3]. - In one army magazine I saw an extended version: "slow is smooth, smooth is fast, fast is deadly" (which doesn't transfer that well to other professions) [0] https://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADA357718/page/23/mode/2up?q=%22slow+is+smooth%22 https://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADA357718/page/23/mode/2up?... [1] https://www.google.de/books/edition/Span_of_Control/IYy_EAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22slow+is+smooth%22+smooth+is+fast&pg=PT101&printsec=frontcover https://www.google.de/books/edition/Span_of_Control/IYy_EAAA... [2] https://archive.org/search?query=%22slow+is+smooth%22&sin=TXT&sort=date https://archive.org/search?query=%22slow+is+smooth%22&sin=TX... [3] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=slow+is+smooth&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=slow+is+smooth...
- 2y ago
- roughly 2y agoEspecially as I've gotten older, I've noticed I do less work more slowly than my younger peers, but I only have to do it once, and I usually get closer to the root than my younger colleagues. Measure twice and all that.
- agumonkey 2y agoLong ago a cousin challenged the uncle for a swim. Both are acceptable athletes. He started faster, was ahead for 50m or so and then came back cooked. The uncle started 30% slower... but he kept at that rhythm forever until we couldn't see him and came back unphased. Very telling lesson.
- borski 2y agoThis is a really big problem for me in general, actually. I have ADHD, and so my brain is always telling me to go faster, so that I can get the dopamine hit and move on to other things. It has to be extremely intentional for me to remind myself that pace matters. I really envy those who can just do that naturally; my wife is one of those people. Meanwhile, when I forget, I find myself 25 minutes into what was going to be an hour-long strength/lifting workout… in the bathroom at the gym throwing up. And then I remember to pace myself for like a year or two until I forget again haha
- al_borland 2y agoI don’t think it always comes naturally. It’s often experience and lessons learned. Sometimes those lessons needed to be taught many times before they stick. For me, I hate doing the same thing twice, because I didn’t get it right the first time. It hurts my soul. I’ll put in a lot of time and effort to avoid that feeling, which means being slow and methodical. The environment I’m in doesn’t always allow for that, which is where most of my stress comes from.
- grogenaut 2y agoI have the opposite problem, I learned from 18 years of competitive sports to spend the minimum effort possible to keep the coaches from being mad at you at everything that didn't matter and go all out in everything that did. Coaches get annoyed when you're not hustling everywhere, but you don't play when you're too tired to do well in scrimmage. I tend to over pace and not be fully spent at the end of a workout. I've had to work to just be toast 90% of the way through instead so I get the most out of my workouts.
- throwaway984393 2y ago[dead]
- zarmin 2y agoGood lord, 99% of the words in that article were unnecessary.
- m3kw9 2y agoOnly the title was necessary
- zarmin 2y agoI think the tip off might have been that it began with "Have you ever" and then below that was a table of contents with 8 top-level sections.
- josh-sematic 2y agoThey were taking it slow.
- tom_ 2y agoAnd slow is smooth... and smooth is fast. Just think how much longer the article would have been if they'd used fewer words.
- zarmin 2y agoso true
- red-iron-pine 2y agoand getting paid hourly + by the word
- hprotagonist 2y agoand the oft-forgotten third clause: “…and speed is the efficiency of motion.” Move only what needs to be moved, and you save a lot of gas. Or as a mentor of mine is fond of saying, “slow down! we’re in a hurry here!”
- borski 2y agoThis is one of the first really important lessons you learn in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Everyone walks in, day one, and is dumping adrenaline everywhere they look. I mean, the person in front of you is literally engaging you in practicing murder, so I get it. Everyone starts that way. Super tense, super shallow breathing, and everyone wears themselves out in about 30-40 seconds. Of a 6 minute round. Doesn’t matter if you’re the most insanely buff dude ever, or seriously overweight. The first guy has better conditioning, no doubt… but not this kind of conditioning. One of my favorite things was watching a new guy walk in, looking like he had maybe 7% body fat, 6’2” at least, plays D1 basketball, and is just nothing but stacked muscle… and then him rolling with a 5’6” 130lb woman who just wipes the floor with him, because training matters more than strength, but even more importantly, breathing and staying calm, slow, and smooth matters even more. The basketball player spends the first minute or so using all his strength to try and get this “puny” girl off of him, unable to, and is now completely gassed. Meanwhile she’s tapped him twice and could go for a run. Eventually, the most important thing you learn is to relax and breathe. Technique eventually comes, through iteration and lots and lots of practice; eventually, things become second nature. But breathing? Reminding yourself to relax and roll smart, not fast? That I need to remind myself of most days, because again: you’re facing someone practicing killing you. :)
- maxioatic 2y agoSame thing with Olympic weightlifting. This is a very common phrase in my gym. Snatching has got to be the most humbling barbell movement ever. Dudes who can easily bench over 100 kg (220 lbs) would never get to close snatching that. (Myself included, but hopefully one day)
- borski 2y agoI know nothing about Olympic weightlifting! What makes snatching so unique and humbling? Aside: you don’t have to, but a one sentence definition of it would be awesome too - my lifting has been limited to the classic stuff, no fancy Olympic “bend and snap” stuff ;)
- 2y ago
- anothername12 2y agoThis works for motorcycle racing
- onlypassingthru 2y agoThis is also the secret to swimming anything other than a sprint.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoI've always loved this phrase. A USMC recon guy I was training with uttered it once and it stuck with me.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ian-g 2y agoI've been taking glassblowing classes for a few years, and this is easily the biggest lesson there. If I rush something, I will fuck it up. If I let things happen bit by bit while they can go smoothly, everything comes out much easier. This probably applies everywhere, but it's really stark when you're playing with quickly-solidifying goopy liquid sand
- borski 2y ago> but it's really stark when you're playing with quickly-solidifying goopy liquid sand I already wanted to learn glassblowing, but hearing it described this way just sold me on it completely. I’m gonna go find a place. :)
- ian-g 2y agoDo it. But maybe ask around a bit first, there might be a couple different places. I went with the one near me that folks said was the most hands-on.
- e12e 2y agoIt's a good mantra - but I'm unsure about this page. Looks like a seal flavoured link farm? I've heard the phrase associated with martial arts/self-defense - like drawing a gun and shooting in self defense, or initiating unarmed attack (defense). Rush and tense up in the muscles - and you will literally be slower. And probably miss as well. I saw a few interesting comments here, like the expanded: "Slow is steady, steady is smooth, smooth is fast" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FZfzqMtwQZES3eqN/slow-is-smooth-and-smooth-is-fast https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FZfzqMtwQZES3eqN/slow-is-sm... And see that Wiktionary hand waves at the military as the origin. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/slow_is_smooth,_smooth_is_fast https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/slow_is_smooth,_smooth_is_f...
- lotophage 2y agoAmbulance personnel/paramedics very much do this, in Australia at least. They never run, never rush, and don't get sucked in to the panic and chaos.
- FireBeyond 2y agoUS paramedic: Same here. If you have to run to a CPR to "save" that person, they're already dead. I had this argument with toxic bosses when I was an SRE - "If PagerDuty goes off I expect you to run to your computer, and have configured the escalations accordingly". No, boss, if I'm not running to a CPR, I'm not running to a "errors exceed 2% for XYZ API call". There's also the adage of "if you get injured, now we're more resource-constrained, because we have an extra patient." The only area where I could see "moving with a purpose" would be uncontrolled bleeding, and getting to a patient for a tourniquet, starting fluid resuscitation and getting you to a surgeon.
- ip26 2y agoYou're a paramedic, so you have more training than I do. I was always taught CPR is a form of life support, and you have around three minutes from the time of arrest to begin CPR to prevent brain damage from hypoxia. So, why would seconds not matter for initiating CPR? Perhaps this is because, as a paramedic on an ambulance, you're simply never on scene within three minutes? (As compared to a bystander)
- FireBeyond 2y agoSo a couple of things, in order: every minute from arrest that no CPR is being done, chances of survival decrease by about 10%. If bystander compression-only CPR has been started, there's about 8 minutes supply of sufficiently oxygenated blood (and while compressions aren't ventilations, they do still encourage some small oxygen exchange). Even when we arrive, gaining advanced airway access or ventilation comes secondary to compressions (our county gives a limited window of 10-15 seconds to pause compressions to intubate, but with Glidescopes it's often possible to intubate through compressions).
- refulgentis 2y agoGPT slop
- CarVac 2y agoI've only heard this in the context of Smash Melee, which has limited-to-no input buffering. If you try to input your attacks and movements too soon, they won't come out at all. So advice to new players is to err on the side of being slow, since it ensures the move input gets registered.
- ErikAugust 2y agoI’ve definitely heard this in distance running, though never attributed to the SEALs. I use a quote from Lydiard on my homepage [1] that’s similar: “It’s much better to go too slowly than too fast.” 1: https://eaj.io https://eaj.io
- V4U 2y agoIn mechanics this is similar to 'kinematic efficiency'. The idea is to achieve smooth and efficient motion by optimizing the ratio of useful work output to total energy input, without caring fo the forces that initiated the motion. In other words, focus on making strategic decisions and making sure you are aiming in the right direction rather than pumping your chest when you pull an all-nighter or feeling too proud about "staying busy". No one cares!
- V4U 2y agoSounds like 'kinematic efficiency'. The idea is to achieve smooth and efficient motion by optimizing the ratio of useful work output to total energy input, without caring fo the forces that initiated the motion. In other words, focus on making strategic decisions and making sure you are aiming in the right direction rather than pumping your chest when you pull an all-nighter or feeling too proud about "staying busy". No one cares!
- motohagiography 2y agothis phrase is used in sailing, skiing, motorcycling, showjumping, skydiving, tennis, classical musicianship, downhill mountain biking, and lately I hear, mma. I have some doubt that it originated with door kickers.
- Waterluvian 2y agoUnless I’ve missed it somewhere I see no claim that it originated with them.
- 10u152 2y agoFunny you say that, as soon as I read it I remember my favorite professional enduro rider coaching people using exactly those words.
- lamontcg 2y agoCave diving uses that phrase as well. I suspect it does originate in the military, though, and probably reloading guns and cannons while under fire. Might go back further than that to bows and arrows. Looks like a related term "make haste slowly" dates back to Roman times and was applied to military commanders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festina_lente https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festina_lente
- ghm2180 2y agoAssuming the premise of this article: efficiency is the only way to survive death(literal or metaphorical). Say what you will about MAANG, but has anyone who is a meta/google etc engineer also been a SEAL? I bet after both the experiences, they will be like: "The only thing we could say with certainty is that how to make effective teams one way or another. 97% you fail or flail. 3% you succeed and succeed big." If you see the graveyard of MAANG Products you can see a pattern. The sheer volume and size of products that have come and gone IS how they survived[1]. Can any one say, for example, Meta is where it is today by doing any of this Slow is Smooth and that is fast culture? Sure, there were acquisitions(those too were fast) and there are bad initiatives and orgs (alexa, google+social, facebook phone), but then there are also many amazing things like LLMs and MooCs. [1] https://killedby.tech/ https://killedby.tech/
- borski 2y agoThere’s definitely plenty of survivorship bias in that argument - you’re making the argument that Meta could not have built successful products without also building a ton of unsuccessful ones, which they did by virtue of executing fast rather than slow/smooth. (I’m paraphrasing to try and ensure I’m understanding the argument correctly, just to be clear) The issue is that if you look at Meta’s successful products… 1. Facebook - would have won whether it moved fast or slow. This was network effects, not “features” 2. Messenger - has not won, and only exists because of Facebook’s aforementioned network effects. 3. Instagram - acquired. 4. Quest - acquired. 5. A bunch of other random shit nobody cares about and will never make Meta money. I can pretty much guarantee both FB and Messenger would be just as big as they are now if Facebook had “broken less crap.” Moving fast and breaking shit made working at Meta fun, not necessarily more productive, even if at times it felt more productive to the engineer, since they could push code faster.
- nemo44x 2y agoIt’s common advice regarding the golf swing. Keeping everything connected with an even tempo creates a fluidity that can be converted to “effortless” power. It’s how to be consistent swing after swing.
- CephalopodMD 2y agoDoes this read to anybody else like it was written by gpt? Super repetitive with awkward organization and prosy style.
- skobes 2y agoYes, the article is pure noise. There's nothing there beyond the title, which seems to be what most of the commenters want to talk about.
- floydnoel 2y ago"slow is smooth and smooth is fast" also isn't restricted to navy seals, nor was it invented by the navy seals. it is common in all military branches and other organizations.
- red-iron-pine 2y agoMost people don't read the articles anyway. But it looks like pro-military agi-prop, standard spec-ops worship stuff.
- agumonkey 2y agoBasically slow doesn't mean slow, it means knowing all the necessary details to go from A to B.
- throw7 2y agoAs with all catchphrases, it's a type of truism. Not that that's bad per se, just that it's better to takeaway that by going slow, you'll be better at identifying, planning, and avoiding "blunders". The tradeoff is: you're going slow. (c.f. Uvalde) There's a kind of corollary on how to get fast from music: you practice as slow as you can perfectly play the etude, then go one step faster until that is perfectly played.
- colordrops 2y agoThis is just the parable of the tortoise and the hare.
- chiefalchemist 2y agoI'll stick with: Haste makes waste. Brevity is a form of efficiency.
- wgm 2y agoWe say this in the operating room, too. Similar idea as “measure twice, cut once”.
- hooverd 2y agoI'd think the secret to Navy SEALs' efficiency was methamphetamines, if Fort Bragg was any indication.
- sam_perez 2y agoAny other Simon Lizotte and/or disc golf fans here? :D
- Bluestein 2y agoTardus est lenis et lenis est ieiunium.-
- Bluestein 2y agoAlso heard "slow is pro" - along the same lines - used by trained lifeguards.-