Progress Takes Time
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Dec 22, 2011
I'll admit it; I like cartoons. I'm more of a fan of old Warner Brothers cartoons and a few others from back in the day, but there are a few newer cartoons I happen to like as well.
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One in particular, called Teen Titans, caught my eye a few nights ago. This particular episode had one of the main characters come upon a villain he was having problems beating. When the villain did an unusual martial arts move on him the hero, Robin (yes, the same one from Batman, only with a different group of characters here), asked him where he'd learned the lesson. The villain told him he'd learned it from one of the ancient masters, then ran off.
Robin then decides he has to go find this master to learn better skills. He goes off on this journey but keeps coming upon obstacles along the way. These frustrate and irritate him because their impediments to where he wants to go. Still, he has no choice in having to tackle these challenges. He also keeps meeting up with an old man who, at one point, chastises him for trying to hurry to his destination to the point of not even stopping to help an old man carry a heavy load. Of course being a hero he does help, but he's doing it more out of shame than kindness.
Just as he gets close to his destination his old nemesis pops up. When asked why he's there is admits that he lied and that he wanted to get to the ancient master as well but didn't want to have to fight the battles, so he just followed close behind Robin, who'd taken care of everything for him.
As they battle, Robin feels the superior force of his opponent, who's not only fresher but is now using all of the tools Robin uses to fight crime against him. Just as he's about to give up the old man shows up and asks him why he's ready to quit when he's so close to his destination, and then asks didn't he learn anything from the trials he'd just gone through. With a renewed sense of purpose and remembering the tactics he'd just learned, he's able to overcome his opponent and realizes that the old man was the ancient master all along. The old master then tells him that he's ready to learn the lessons he came for.
I found this to be an incredible lesson that many of us need to learn and then need to learn to teach others more than just a pretty good cartoon. When I got out of college I expected to just walk into a new job with a high salary because I had a degree. As you can imagine, it didn't happen. My first job paid me $2.90 an hour stocking shelves early mornings at a Kmart in 1982, almost 9 months after graduating.
I ended up taking many baby steps as far as jobs were concerned before I started moving up the ladder. With each step I learned something, and more than just the work I was doing. I learned philosophies, sometimes in spite of people I was reporting to, because we can learn both from those we like and trust and those we don't. We can learn a lot from watching others and from interacting with others, things that will help us both in work and in life.
So many people try to take shortcuts to get what they want. Often when they get there it ends up disastrously; that is, if they get there at all. Do everything you can to move as fast as you can, but make sure to put your time in as well. When you're trying to get ahead too quickly you might miss the lessons the rest of us learn along the way (and if you quote this, make sure people know I said it lol).
This reminds me of the usual path companies here used to take, starting full on, hiring 50 people and bankrupting after few months.
I’ve always preferred to take small steps, put the company in front of my own interests as much as possible and grow the business with a speed that felt comfortable. This doesn’t mean one shouldn’t *dare*, of course it’s vital to dare in many situations. But one thing is to dare, one, totally different thing is to be reckless.
Gabriele, I worked at a hospital that did the same thing. Built a new department and hired all the staff 5 months before they were ready to open. Thing lost money immediately and 3 years later they had to close it down. And I warned them, they didn’t listen, I lost my job, they lost theirs afterwards.
I am also big fan of cartoon, actually in the last years, there was a period of time when for 8 months, I watched only Japanese cartoon, I really would recommend “Berserk”, “Shura no Toki” and “Hakuouki”, not very popular titles in western world, suitable for kids, but generally need to be adult to understand what is all about. By the way, I’ve watched few episodes of “Teen Titans”, my son likes it, actually I think he had learned quite a lot of English from cartoons.
About the other part of the article which is more important, I don’t think that taking shortcuts can work well for anybody at least in the first states of anything, but when knowledge and flexibility are at advanced level, this opens a possibilities. For my first job, I think that I took the shortcut and this lead to financial freedom when I was at the age of 14, haha nothing illegal, I was doing 3D animation and in my country there were only 3 other people. The shortcut was that I’ve started learning from videos, instead paper tutorials. The bad part was that I was not prepared to get that much money at this age, I was rarely visiting school, traveling to business meetings and holidays.
That’s an important lesson as well Carl. There are so many people that have made lots of money and then lost it all because they weren’t prepared to handle it. That’s a part of the progress trail; that part takes time to learn for a lot of people as well.
Count me in this people, this had happened several times to me, but honestly I don’t really mind that most of the time, actually in one particular case, I decided to lose everything deliberately, just to discover my happiness again.
Hi Mitch,
Great post! It is very inspiring. Indeed progress takes time and it takes a lot of perseverance to make it in the end. I remember this one famous quote
When the world says, “Give up,”
Hope whispers, “Try it one more time.”
Thanks for posting this very inspiring article.
Great stuff Tracy; I like that quote a lot.