He observed that there were always signs on these bridges: “Walk your horse.” Apparently galloping across a bridge creates a rhythmic pattern that weakens the structural foundations. To make the bridge secure for longer, people on horses dismounted and walked slowly and deliberately.
He uses this to illustrate a fascinating point about the American perceptions of time in the past. It was really never about haste. The idea of a “New York minute” is new. The old way is patience, discipline, slow achievement, and unrelenting and constant work in all hours.
Sloane points out that if you ever visited an older farmer and see how he works, he is rather slow about it all but never stops going. He does this and does that but never seems to be in a rush. He seeks to do a thorough job, not a quick one. He doesn’t get frustrated with the wood that doesn’t fit, the nail that is rusted, or the door jam that is off; instead, he just calmly takes it on as another thing to do.
I vaguely recall this as a young man when I worked with my uncle on a roofing job. We climbed up carefully and slowly and started pulling shingles one by one, fixing or replacing them, and moving on to the next one. I quickly grew impatient as I saw the huge length we had to cover. I started to rush my portion and brag about it. He looked at me knowingly.
We worked for hours in the hot sun. Finally, at nearly the noon hour, we said we should take a break. I was deeply grateful, climbed down the ladder, and headed for the water hose. I drank as much and as fast as I could. He muttered a warning about that. Sure enough, I threw up. Blech. He laughed and we went inside.
He sat down and his wife bought him not a gigantic glass of water but a cup of coffee. I sat there gobsmacked. How in the world could he have coffee after 4 hours in the hot sun with nonstop work? Years later, I was still thinking about this.
Sloane has the answer. He didn’t work fast or furiously to exhaustion. He worked slowly and deliberately, consistent with his job and his health. He knew what he was doing. I did not.
After the break and a sandwich, we climbed back up. I was intimidated by how much more there was to do. We got back at it. Another three hours went by, and we took another break. We got back up and worked more.
Sure enough, by 5 o’clock on the hour, we finished. I was thrilled and I simply could not believe how two people working steadily and deliberately could have done all that in one day. I felt great pride and still celebrate to this day.
For my uncle it was just another day, which he repeated every day on everything on which he worked.
Sloane says that this is the true American spirit. Not speed. Not haste. Not a quick win. Instead, the sense of time in our history is relentlessness, patience, deliberate, determined, steady, disciplined. Routine not dopamine. This is the foundation of the American sense of time that we have clearly lost.
Speed these days comes at the highest premium. We expect everything to happen fast. We don’t read; we watch the movie. We listen to video interviews at twice the pace of the real thing. We generate the AI summary rather than spend an hour reading. We glom onto any technology that turns days into hours and hours into minutes and minutes into seconds.
This distorted sense of time plays into things like business planning. We are supposed to have 5-year plans and 1-year plans for everything. This is supposed to inspire us to build quickly, act fast, stay driven to achieve, and keep us undiverted. I’ve always been suspicious of this way of thinking.
As I turn this over in my mind, I’ve always believed that the only real path to long-term success is simply to do a good day’s work. Nothing more. Make sure you get from here to there successfully in one day. Do that every day.
In six months or a year, you can look back and say. “Wow, look what we have achieved!” But there is no point in planning it out. All you can really do is the job one day at a time, solving puzzles and problems as they come.
We’ve become so obsessed with speed that we are frustrating ourselves that we cannot do it. Instead of loving what we do, and doing it completely and with excellence, our culture trains us to hate what we are doing and only love the thing we are not doing, and rush to do that instead. And we treat the new thing the same as old: a regrettable task.
For that reason, we are always discontent and never fully engaged in the task at hand. We are fidgety and fill ourselves with resentment. Instead, we should learn to love what we must do and do it with patience and completeness so that we can always say: a job well done.
Almost all young people today believe they are afflicted with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or ADHD. This supposed disease is entirely made up, never discovered. It is simply a description of people who are in a wild rush and unable to be patient in their studies or work.
Even worse, we have manufactured drugs to fix this supposed affliction. They have a lot in common with street narcotics, but they are acceptable because doctors prescribe them. They cause people to be wildly focused on one thing and do seemingly impossible work, generating weeks of productivity in one all-nighter.
Magic, right? Not so much. I’ve worked with many people on these drugs. They do amazing things, just not quite the right things. Ask them to revise what they did, and they report barely remembering having done it at all.
After much experience, I concluded that I would rather work with moderately talented people with a predictable, deliberate, and even slow pace of gradual achievement, rather than someone who lives with wild bursts of amazingness that comes and goes and can never be tweaked because it was done in a mental haze. Such people think they are achievers, but actually they just drive everyone else nuts.
I love work, but I’ve also come to appreciate how crucial it is to mix one’s desire to achieve with a passion for doing what one does with precision and completeness, regardless of how long it takes. Thanks to technology and our worship of progress, we have subsidized speed at the expense of quality, rationality, durability, and longevity.
Think where that has landed us. We buy things all the time now—phones, tablets, laptops, electric kitchen gizmos, choppers, and tiny machines of all sorts—that we know for sure are not going to last more than a few years at most.
They will be replaced with more spending and more stuff. We know this, and we do it anyway and yet why? Because we assume that this gadgeting will help us achieve our aims faster.
It’s all rather exhausting and mostly wrong. Just look around your kitchen, for example. That juicer machine takes up lots of counter space when a hand-held and operated squeezer fits in a drawer. How much time do you really save? And isn’t there some joy you can find in doing things by hand?
Or how about lights and music? Must they all be operated by your phone? What exactly is the downside of standing up and changing the music or turning the light on or off? Truly, this is getting ridiculous. The goal of life is not to lounge on the sofa while pushing buttons to make things happen all around you. Maybe there is some sense of achievement that comes from actually doing something yourself.
Time in America past: slow, deliberate, thorough, and relentless. Time in America present: rushed, haphazard, panicked, sloppy, and with no longevity. It’s all just crazy. We live long lives, God willing. We can make the best of them by putting quality over speed, discipline over performance, routine over dopamine, and completeness over the cosmetics of artificial productivity.
In short, we need to get better at hopping off the horse, walking it across the bridge, and helping to make sure the structure lasts for the next person. The sign to which Sloane pointed was correct, and it applies to much more than just old-fashioned covered bridges.
