“It does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop.” – Teach Different with Confucius

Transcript

Dan Fouts (00:10)

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Teach Different podcast. We are ecstatic today, and here’s why. We are going to learn the wisdom of Confucius, 500 BC is when he lived and shared Chinese philosophy that has survived to this day. So we’re talking about something 2, 500 years ago, Confucius shared his wisdom, and we’re still talking about Confucius today. And we’re going to do that on the Teach Different podcast. We have a great quote from Confucius that talks about progress and moving through life in the right kind of pace. And we’ll get to that in a moment, but after we do the quote, as we know with the Teach Different method, we will look at the claim of the quote, what is Confucius trying to say? Trying to apply it to our own personal experiences, of course. And then we’ll work on a counterclaim, what is something against what Confucius is saying? A competing idea, a competing perspective, another way to look at the world. We can’t be afraid to push against and disagree. There’s always another way of looking at the world. And so the Teach Different method is always sensitive to that. It’s important to have that competing perspective. And then as the questions come up, we’ll share them. Questions are natural byproducts of good conversations. And we also have a guest today, our Teach Different podcast producer, Siye, and I’ll let her introduce herself and weigh in on the quote with us. And we’re so happy to have her with us today. Here we go. Here’s the quote. I’ll read it twice. It does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop. It does not matter how slowly you go,as long as you do not stop Confucius. So what do we think of the claim here?

Steve Fouts (02:23)

Tenacity is what’s important. Grit, commitment, way more important than speed. And I think it really takes a different part of your emotional state to be good at sticking to something as opposed to doing something quickly and trying to accomplish something, you know, with immediate gratification. This is just saying you gotta stick to things and you should have patience you could even throw in as well. It does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop. That’s basically saying you should be patient, whatever it is.

Dan Fouts (03:13)

Be patient. Patient was the word I had in my head as well. It’s hard to be patient. My mind is going right to my classroom with my students right now. We just did a Supreme Court project in my government class where students had to stand up in front of their peers and deliver a presentation. It is terrifying. And I share with them the journey of public speaking that I had myself, where when I started, I was really nervous. I couldn’t do it. And then now, all these years later in teaching, it’s my job and I’m so comfortable doing it. And I adopted, I would apply this one to my life and say, I adopted the idea that I’m not going to be great at this at the beginning. It’s going to be slow. I’ve got to be patient. I have to see success in small chunks and just don’t stop. And that’s hard, public speaking is one good example, at least for me, where because I didn’t stop, I’d become much better at it, and that’s what really mattered, that I stuck with it. So that’s my personal experience right there.

Siye Dlamini (04:30)

And I think, just to add to that, is the fact that with social media and the way we live our lives right now, we live in a world of instant gratification, so I can understand why young students are finding it hard to be patient and wait for results and not actually just give up before you start seeing any progress, and I think a lot of us struggle with that. My personal example is that at the beginning of this year I started a fitness journey, and I had never been into fitness even during my school days. I was into the arts and I was not a sporty kid. So starting this Obviously I sucked and I allowed myself to suck and I said I was going to just keep my word and continue to show up, even if maybe sometimes I miss a couple of days of my training and I don’t show up the way that I had wanted to, but the main goal is to continue to show up and slowly, but surely I’ve become better. I’m not the greatest, but I have become better and I’ve seen the progress. So I think sometimes we’re too quick to give up, and especially when we’re not seeing results right away, just because we live in such a world of instant gratification. We want to see the likes on social media immediately. We want people to listen to our podcasts immediately and see growth. However, in reality, it doesn’t work like that. You’re not going to grasp everything immediately, and I think I like this quote because it just, it’s a reminder to actually take it slow also to avoid burnout and things like that. We speak a lot about burnout, but it’s because we’re not taking the time to do things slowly until we reach that end goal, whatever it is.

Steve Fouts (06:24)

Yeah, that’s great. I never thought of burnout in that way. It’s true though. When you post something on social media, it could go viral. Why isn’t it going viral? You know, think of that mentality and then just realizing, no, get into a routine and a rhythm and let people understand who you are and what you do and the content you’re producing over time. What people like is consistency. You know, if you want to really think about this as, how are you going to grip someone’s attention in the long run? It’s really showing that you’re going to be there, and you’re going to be something they can rely on. That goes with being a good friend. Et cetera.

Dan Fouts (07:16)

Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. Another quick example before we head into the counterclaim, I’m interested to see what you guys think of the counterclaim here, but Steve, the Teach Different podcast, when we started this in January of 2020, I think we had two listeners in the first episode. And now it’s pushing five years and we’re knocking 200, 000 listens. You know, we went slowly. The consistency, I think, is the most important thing. You want to give up, but then you just got to keep going. So I, there’s so much, so much. Yeah. Well, okay. Do you guys have an idea of a counterclaim here? It does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop.

Steve Fouts (08:14)

What do you think, Siye?

Siye Dlamini (08:18)

I think the first thing that comes to mind is that sometimes there is great wisdom in stopping, especially when things, I don’t know, maybe let’s say I’ll use fitness again, as the most recent example in my life. Maybe let’s say I was doing a certain workout that is hurting my knees, right? And instead of continuing to do that workout over and over again, and being consistent at it, the realization that this is not good for me and stopping and trying something else and pivoting is also, can be a good thing to a certain degree.So I don’t need to keep showing up and doing the same thing that is hurting me. I can do something else. Right? And if I’m failing at something, sometimes maybe that just isn’t my thing and I have to try something else and potentially get better results that way.

Steve Fouts (09:22)

I like the physical. I like that.

Dan Fouts (09:27)

Sometimes if you’re going slowly, it’s a sign that you need to stop what you’re doing and that you’re not good at it. I’m thinking of people who get a job that they want to like, the salary’s good, the benefits are good, and they keep working at it, but then they wake up in the morning and they dread going to work, it’s not working out. So maybe, pivoting.

Steve Fouts (09:57)

How do you know when you should quit? Here’s a counterclaim to me. That’s an essential question, obviously. That’s what felt like it was natural from this. Because you really shouldn’t continue all things. And it doesn’t matter how slowly you’re going, stopping is exactly what you need to do. And what came to mind for me was a relationship with someone else. It could be like a significant other or even a friend. And maybe you keep making excuses for their behavior or maybe the way they are treating you because you’re empathizing with the situation. They might be going through something, but they drag you down a little bit. You know, you’re not getting anything back from them. You’re investing a lot in a relationship that you’re not, I don’t want to say profiting from, but you get the point. You’re not getting anything out of it. You don’t want to be Mr. or Mrs. Patience for a time frame that’s undetermined. You know, there will come a time where stopping is what you may need to do, and doesn’t mean you have to leave someone or ignore them or ostracize them for your life, but you need to reset and reframe and get out of this mode of waiting, waiting, waiting. And you really demand something more immediate from people. You make that demand, you know, I need you to be positive around me. Like immediately figure out a way to do it, because if you don’t, I’m not going to wait anymore. I got to move on. So that’s what I thought about.

Dan Fouts (11:56)

And it matters when you stop. Because when you stop, it gives you an opportunity to reset, recommit yourself to other things. And that develops within you a sense of renewal. And it actually generates a better human being sometimes when you’re starting something anew. So I would agree with the relationship side of this.

Steve Fouts (12:29)

You remember that student conversation we had where Marcin was talking about the importance of stopping so that you can move forward, you know, when he struggled with his business and it didn’t go the way he wanted. He could have just stayed with it and said, don’t stop, don’t stop, keep doing your business. He decided to leave it, treat it as a learning experience, and that renewed him. He had to stop to move on. So that’s what this quote misses. That’s the best counterclaim, I think.

Dan Fouts (13:07)

Okay, good. This is great. Confucius. It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop. Thank you everybody for joining us on the Teach Different podcast. We hope to get many listeners for  this episode, and we have some exciting things going on with Teach Different that I’ll share a few right now. First of all, all of these episodes now are going up on our YouTube channel. So check that out as another venue to listen to this and previous episodes. And also, we have developed a certificate program that we developed as a consequence of a grant that we got in Illinois from the Illinois department of human services. We are developing this to help people go through a week, actually, it’s about an about an eight week program to learn the Teach Different method in their setting, whether it be a school or anything else. And in that way, we’re going to work with people one on one to really get this down and to bring it to their community. So we’re really excited about this certificate program approach that we think is really going to make a huge difference in the communities we serve.

Steve Fouts (14:33)

Yeah.

Dan Fouts (14:34)

All right. Well, thanks. Thanks everybody. Really appreciate you joining us and have a wonderful day and we’ll see you on the next Teach Different podcast.