Patience and the Long Game

Patience is…

your ability to endure. On one hand you might have a phone with Instagram running. On the other hand, you have the choice of closing your eyes and being aware of your surroundings. Being mindful.

Which one will you go for? Unfortunately for me, for 80% of cases I will go for Instagram. Because of instant gratification. The reward of being mindful outweighs watching Instagram by a huge margin. I know it. You know it. All know it. But knowing and practicing is different. Because practice takes effort. And you have to endure. You have to be patient to see the results.

All big rewards come after being patient.

Investing is the first thing that comes to mind. For the money to compound you have to wait and let it grow. If you stop its compounding, you lose its massive growth. Imagining money is easy because we can see it. Its visible. And we know it from other people experiences.

But what about the reward you get when you start out a new journey? Let’s say you want to start a drop shipping business. You find a dealer which will supply you stuff. You hire a freelancer to build you website. And finally you bring it to the market.

But after 1 month you get no sale. Discouraged you think it’s not for you. And you close down the curtain. But what if after 1 year of persisting you finally found the element you were missing? And its not just what if, you will. Practice. Breathing the business for long time. These stuffs unlock insights which isn’t possible in short time of practice.

Being patient, you have to deal with yourself.

The biggest enemy of yourself in the pursuit of being patient, is you. Because a part of you wants instant gratification.

This is also due to our environment. All companies keep optimizing fast result. Fast delivery, fast messaging, fast searching and so on. Because of that that the dopamine inside of you gets released faster and faster. Even our society has expectations of getting result fast. Fast promotion, fast sales, fast development and so on.

So naturally in your “you” time you also strive to be fast. But unfortunately, this brings the opposite result. The fastest path to success is the long game. Not instant.

You can’t be fit in a day. You can’t master drop shipping in 1 month. You can’t earn million dollars in a 3 months. All takes time. Which is natural. After all its our path that makes us. Not the result. Burning the bridge will do no good.

So stop that part of you which wants fast result in things that matter. Let it go. And embrace the long game.