The Basic Basics: PATIENCE.
This Andy Rementer comic nicely captures the impatience that often accompanies our hyperconnected lives.
- “Did you have a chance to read that e-mail yet?”
- “I left you two voice-mails this morning — why didn’t you get back to me?”
- “We’ve been running this promotion for three whole days but it’s not moving the needle at all!”
- Et cetera.
Rementer’s comic is beautifully absurd because we all recognize Bach as a master practitioner whose music did not need to make an instant splash. Even when he wrote music very quickly (as he often did), his work’s elegance and profundity have endured for centuries.
Very often, good ideas take time, patience, and sustained hard work to bear fruit. Not forever, but a while.
Wine impresario Gary Vaynerchuck is seen by many of his fans as an online marketing guru. While Gary counsels these fans to hustle every day to make a viable business out of whatever it is that drives their passions, he also cautions them that, if you’re building a business, it won’t happen overnight. It takes time.
Merlin Mann, similarly, has been preaching the virtues of doing things “Better”* — and defending the need for bloggers, including himself, to take their time in creating something of real value. That doesn’t usually happen after 20 seconds of deep thought. It takes time.
It takes time to build something worthwhile. Sure — keep moving and keep hustling every day, but put the focus on “build” and “worthwhile.”
You can hurry all you want, but even if you finish first, it won’t do you a lick of good if you haven’t built something worthwhile.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to listen to the Well-Tempered Clavier . . .
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* That particular Mann piece has R-rated language in it. Spot poll: do you want me to warn you about stuff like that, or should I just point you to it and let you find that out for yourself?
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Related posts:
- The Basic Basics: Have a GOAL.
- The Basic Basics: “It’s my fault.”
- The Basic Basics: Run to the Point of Contact.
- The Basic Basics: Solve someone’s problem.
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Comic by Andy Rementer — used by permission.
Category: Management, The working life
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2 Comments so far
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Tim, Great post. This idea is central to one of my biggest problems, and something I am actively working on, with success, everyday. I often tell people that I am the most analytical person they’ve ever met. I can’t seem to turn my mind off from analyzing every single angle of every action, and it can drive me to be very hasty and make bad decisions. Lately, I have instead driven myself to stop, be patient, and wait some things out without overreacting towards what I think the problem is. I must say that the results have been incredible. Most of the time my analysis tend to be over-dramatic and because I’ve waited things ended up great, instead of me actually causing a problem.
Thanks for the comment, Devin. It’s tempting, when you’re well-informed and analytically-minded, to formulate opinions on everything, along with plans to fix the world according to your own oh-so-flawless specifications. (I speak from experience!)
But MOST things aren’t worth that level of analysis. Maybe they’re worth a sketch opinion rather than a full-blown analysis, and maybe we’re better off keeping that opinion to ourselves.
If something’s big and bad and important, by all means turn the analysis+action spotlight on it.
But MOST things can stand a wait-and-see approach.