Quick 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 rep

Quick 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...