Patience is a Terrific Growth Strategy

Patience has not been a natural virtue of mine. It doesn't come easy to me at all.

And yet I have been learning to harness its power over the past couple of years.

Without patience we are doomed, because even if we produce the greatest work out there, there are no (or very few) instant successes. Success (however you define it for yourself) needs time. And time requires patience.

Patience is your invisible friend. While producing great work is the foundation, patience is the secret ingredient to keep you going. Because even if you're producing shitty work starting out, patience allows you to study your work over time, then reflect, learn, adapt and get better.

If we get nervous or anxious because results are not rolling in right away, we are passing up a great learning opportunity and all the personal and professional achievements that come with it.

Or how Naval puts it:

Well, long-term requires patience. But I chose the word terrific in the title very intentionally.

Because terrific means "extremely good or excellent", but actually originates from the latin word terrere, which means "to frighten" 🤓. So yes patience is both an excellent and a frightening growth strategy.

Excellent because consistently producing great work over a long time horizon is arguably the most overlooked growth strategy out there. And frightening because, without any guarantee we put all our faith into the fact that all of our hard work will pay out one day.

How to practice patience?

To that I have a remedy straight out of the Bhagavad Gita:

“Let your concern (or focus) be on your action, let it not be on the outcome of the action. Do not act only out of expectation of a result.”

Or in other words: Any action is like a released arrow. It is irreversible. Of course it has an intended target (i.e. result), but after it has been done, you do not have any control over the result. So there is no use in fretting over the result. In fact, the less you worry about the end result, but focus on the work itself, the more likely it is that your work will get the intended result.

With that in mind, practicing patience becomes so much easier.