Leveraging Patience

“God, give me patience, but give it to me now.”

I love that sort of joke of a prayer. My mom often quotes it to me, and I guess it's because I'm not a very patient person by my nature. But here, I'm going to share with you something that I'm working so hard on. I've become better at it, but it's still difficult.

The Value of Entrepreneurial Patience

I think patience is especially difficult for entrepreneurs, for people who get excited about things and see possibilities, and for people who want to make the world a better place. We get excited about things!

And that’s when the impatience sets in. Where is it coming? When is it coming, why isn't it here yet? I did all my stuff. I mapped out my plan. I did all the homework I'm supposed to. I listened to the podcast by so-and-so. I did this dude or this gal's course. I've done what I'm supposed to do, damn it. Where is it?

This impatience can reflect a little bit of immaturity, like a child pounding their fists or throwing a tantrum if they don't get what they want. But more often it reflects a lack of understanding that our minds work very quickly, and our minds can envision things of what could be, but this doesn’t always translate into the real world. For example, I think most people can envision the concept or at least the idea of world peace. It's not that difficult to imagine, but making it happen takes work, and can be a lot more complicated than we think.

Change Takes Time

However you view the world, whether you believe there are divine forces at play or not, what we've learned from science is, biologically speaking, things are made of energy and they comprise solid, liquid, and gas, and these things don't necessarily change quickly. People don't change quickly, even though our body cells change. It takes a while for things to happen. It takes a while for a child to go from a baby into an adult. And so many things that are great require patience and they require an ongoing commitment.

I encourage you to look in the areas where you're impatient and to see whether or not it's serving you. To be really clear here, there are certain areas where it should serve you to be impatient. If somebody is mean to you, abusive with you, if you're in a job situation that just is horrible, being impatient can be a very good thing. If there's an emergency situation, you need to get out of the house. Being impatient can be a good thing.

I’m not saying that patience is always the answer. But it often takes a lot more time for things to manifest or happen or be made real in the material world than it does in our imaginations and in our brains. If you talk to anybody who's been growing a business for at least five years, or if they've written a book or if they have launched a product, just about always they'll tell you, "It took longer than I thought."

People joke about this all the time, but a lot of the time things just take longer, especially if we're committed to doing them right and doing them well.

This is just something to keep an eye on in your life. Impatience: where does it serve you? In what areas is it helping you? Whether this is as a parent watching your children grow, whether it is with your boss or your employees. And patience: where does that serve you? Where does it serve you better in long-term relationships to perhaps be more patient with people and to have the patience to actually listen to people and hear what they're saying?

Again, I am so guilty of so many of these things, so please don't take this as me preaching to you. I'll be listening to this advice myself and making sure I keep coming back to it, because it's something I struggle with.

The Power and the Danger of Expectations

For some people, it’s almost like a curse to be able to imagine or envision things being better to then become impatient. One of my favorite quotes by Deepak Chopra is that infinite patience creates immediate results. And that means if you're a really patient person, things happen a lot quicker than you thought they would.

The expectation is often the most difficult part: the expectation that things are supposed to happen at a certain pace, whether it's love, your career, having kids, or getting the kids to finally brush their teeth without you asking them. The expectation is often what makes things so difficult.

But if the expectation is that things will happen as they happen and when they're ready, then there's a natural rhythm and pace to things, and it becomes a lot easier to go through life.

For a lot of people, even the concept of anxiety, an entire diagnosis in psychology, comes down to worrying about expectations. This is not in any way to put you down. If you're taking pills for anxiety, I feel for you. I hope for you, I'm praying for you. But sometimes we just have this expectation that it's supposed to happen so quickly, and when it's not happening as fast, we get so nervous and feel like we should be doing something, instead of just saying, "Things take a while, and that’s ok."

I hope this serves you. Take your time. Relax. Enjoy the ride. As Van Wilder says, "Don't take things so seriously. If you take life so seriously, you'll never make it out alive."

As always, I look forward to helping you make more money in less time doing what you do best so you can enjoy a more abundant and happy friendship, family, loved ones, and everything else in life. Thank you.