Patience

If you were to ask my friends, I’d surely not be known as the most patient of the bunch.

Patience is something I struggle with, but something I am extremely aware of. I know how important it is to be patient. I know just how important and valuable it is it to be a long term player. I know that over optimizing for short term activities can hurt you in the long run and it is best to find a balance between the two.

BUT

I still find the mystique around the long term a bit unrealistic.

The now is tangible. Shipping products today feels like progress whereas caving in stealth mode on a long run idea feels like procrastination.

But patience would tell me that a) good things take time and b) progress in the short run can be false validation.

I think a lot about validation. We are all humans and the basic psychology of positive and negative reinforcement can inform us that how, where, and why we get our validation actually can make a massive difference on the decisions we make on a day to day basis.

I would argue that most of us actually make decisions, in large part, as a sole product of what type of validation we are / may be receiving.

This is true on a personal sense, like on social media, but also in a professional sense, like for what job to work at or what project to launch.

Patience is something only you can develop, and in my mind it comes from learned experiences and setting the right expectations.

Expectations are everything, and I find it impossible to be patient when my expectations are way off.

If I expect a project to take a week and it takes 6 months…

Setting the right expectations is just as hard as developing patience itself. It is so important though to internally be setting expectations, and constantly iterating over those projections.

That will keep morale up and keep you racing towards a goal.

Originally published at gonen.blog.