slow and steady wins the race

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

consistent, patient, and disciplined effort ultimately achieves better results than fast but erratic or unsustainable bursts of activity; the moral drawn from Aesop's fable of the tortoise and the hare, in which the tortoise's methodical pace defeats the hare's superior natural speed because the hare's overconfidence leads to complacency; the proverb counsels against the appeal of rapid dramatic action in favour of sustained incremental progress, and has been applied to domains from athletic training — where progressive overload and recovery cycles outperform unsustainable intensity — to investment, where compound growth over long periods typically outperforms speculative trading — to education, where deep understanding built patiently outperforms cramming