Festina Lente

Make haste slowly.

It sounds like a contradiction. It isn't. It's the most useful piece of advice about speed anyone has written down.

What festina lente means

Festina is a command, "hurry." Lente means "slowly." Put together: hurry, slowly. Move with purpose, but don't rush the parts that need care. Speed without care breaks the work. Care without speed never finishes it.

Augustus's favorite saying

The Roman historian Suetonius, in his Life of Augustus (chapter 25), says the first emperor thought nothing was less fitting in a good commander than haste and rashness. Augustus liked to repeat a Greek proverb, speude bradeos, "hurry slowly." Festina lente is the Latin form of the same idea.

Suetonius also records a related line Augustus used: something done well enough is done fast enough. That's a decent summary of how he ran an empire for about 40 years. He wasn't the most brilliant general of his era. He was the most patient one. He built slowly and kept what he built. Suetonius says he died quietly at Nola in AD 14, kissing his wife Livia goodbye.

The dolphin and the anchor

The idea got a picture in the Renaissance. The Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, who published some of the first pocket-sized editions of the classics around 1500, took a dolphin wrapped around an anchor as his printer's mark. The dolphin is speed. The anchor is steadiness. The image came off a Roman coin. Erasmus, who worked with Aldus, says in his Adagia that Aldus showed him a silver coin with the emperor's head on one side and a dolphin wrapped around an anchor on the other, a gift from the Venetian scholar Pietro Bembo. Erasmus called it a coin of Vespasian. Coins like it were struck under his son Titus around AD 80.

The American publisher Doubleday took a dolphin and anchor as its colophon, and its paperback line Anchor Books was named after it. Not bad for a 2,000-year-old saying.

How to pronounce it

Classical: feh-STEE-nah LEN-teh. Church Latin is about the same. Stress on "STEE."

Using it in training

Progress that sticks is slow. Add 5 pounds, not 25. Take the deload week. Most injuries come from rushing a weight you weren't ready for. The lifters who are strong at 50 are the ones who weren't in a hurry at 25. Show up fast. Load slowly.

Using it at work

Move quickly on decisions you can undo. Go slow on the ones you can't. Ship the draft, but read the contract twice. Most "urgent" work isn't, and the stuff that really is urgent goes better when you're calm.

Using it when you travel

Don't fit 4 cities into 7 days. Pick 2. Walk instead of taking the cab when you can. You'll see more by moving slower, which is the whole point of the phrase.

Why it's on a shirt

It's something to wear when you train or head out into the day. Steady effort, kept up.

It's on the men's Helm tee and the women's Helm tee.