Patience

I think for me the #1 thing that gets in the way of perceived success is patience.

It’s such a difficult thing.

I’m a relatively ambitious 26 year-old, I recently moved to the big city, I’m a social media degenerate. I live in a world of instant gratification. Everything moves so FAST these days, faster than ever before.

I went to an AI meetup yesterday and people were talking about the year 2021 as if it was ancient history (and in many ways they aren’t wrong).

But the reality is that good things really do come to those who wait.

And for many people, waiting is the hardest part.

Which means if you can train yourself to be patient, or create an environment for yourself that cultivates patience, you are building a competitive advantage over the crowd.

Think about Jeff Bezos. He is one of the most famous long-term thinkers of our time. So much so that every memo he writes is framed in favor of a 10-year time horizon. So much so that he’s invested millions of his own dollars into building a 10,000-year clock inside of a mountain.

Think about Elon Musk. His driving force has long been the idea of building a multi-planetary civilization by colonizing Mars over the next few hundred years. An effort he knows full-well he will not be able to witness the benefits of, yet he pursues it anyways.

It’s no coincidence that both of these men are now amongst the richest in all of human history. There is something extremely potent and differentiated about dedicating yourself to a hyper-long-term plan and pursuing it with the utmost patience and diligence. It’s one of the highest virtues.

Yet nowadays it is so easy to get caught up in the minute-by-minute. In a 30min time span I can consume more content scrolling through instagram than people born 200 years ago would have seen in an entire lifetime.

In many ways it feels like people my age have no interest in the long-haul. It’s all about building something to get rich now and get off the grid or whatever. The truth is that there is no “retirement”, there is no “ride off into the sunset” — they are false peaks. We will get to our old age and realize that we want nothing more but to continue contributing.

For now, the way to think about it is to say “what do I want to look back on when I am a 90-year-old wrinkly bag of bones and be proud of?”

It will likely be a long-term pursuit over many many years, as opposed to something you could accomplish over the course of a few months. So you might as well settle in.

If you are a young person like me, repeat these words:

• I have plenty of time

• I have plenty of time

• I have plenty of time

Because you do. It’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, when we really underestimate what can be accomplished over a decade of hard, continuous, incremental work.

After reading, close laptop, stop what you’re doing, and smell the roses my friend.

Peace,

Ramsey