F*ck Patience

A couple of weeks ago during an AMA something hit me...

I know the secret to making big dreams come true.

But I’m terrible at explaining it. It’s super simple on the surface, and yet massively complicated as you dive into the nuances of its heart.

If you’ll permit me, I’m going to use this article as a way of both clarifying my thoughts, and hopefully giving you one of the most powerful pieces of information on the topic you will ever receive.

Here goes…

To Achieve Big Dreams:

1. Learn to hold two competing ideas in your head.

2. Accept that pulling off big things takes a very long time.

3. Accept that you will only accomplish big dreams at the end of a very long timeline if you scream in your mind "FUCK PATIENCE” at frequent intervals.

Let’s dive into detail, shall we?

1. Competing Ideas

This is the dirty secret of success. You have to learn how to believe two opposing ideas at the same time, and see that there is no conflict between them.

It is one of the more surprising aspects of being a human. We soooooo long for rules and certainty that we miss the truth of the way the world works—things often oscillate between two opposing forces, e.g., you have to know when to love yourself and when to hate yourself.

Finding balance in your life is the surest way to race to mediocrity, but if you don’t know how to play, all of your victories will be hollow.

Sometimes the ideas are more like gas and brake (in that they both serve a valuable function, they just can’t be used at the same time, or in the same quantities), and other times, they are opposing truths that seem impossible to believe simultaneously. And yet, there they are.

When it comes to making Big Dreams come true, the two competing ideas you must hold in your head are the two big concepts that follow: You’d better have the patience to think and act long-term at all times because Big Dreams always take an insane amount of time. And equally true, if you ever allow your actions to be governed by anything that even rhymes with patience, you are totally and hopelessly screwed. You will fail.

2.  Big Dreams Take Time

I wish it weren’t so, but Big Dreams take time to execute. There are really two major factors in this.

You just don’t know enough yet to pull off your Big Dream. Much of your time is going to be spent learning. Some of that learning will be formal learning. You’ll be reading books and newsletters like this one, watching videos, talking to experts, etc.

You’ll also be taking action (which is the most information-rich data stream you will ever encounter—nothing, and I mean nothing, is as instructive as action) and failing a lot. If you don’t waste time with stupid mental gyrations about being stupid and a failure, you’ll see in those failures the data that you need to grow and develop.

In this process of learning, you will gain the skills that you need to execute on your dreams. But no matter how fast you learn, at even elite human learning speeds it takes years and years to develop the skill set that you’re going to need.

Big Dreams require teams. There is precious little that takes more time than assembling the right teams. And while this is not the forum to go into everything that it takes to build an amazing team, I will plant this bug in your ear: make friends before you need them.

That maxim has served me so well I can’t even begin to tell you. If you’re ever going to take something on blind faith from me, take that truth. Make friends before you need them. Be good to people. Be kind. Help them with their stuff. Tell them what you’re up to. If they say they can help, stop and listen. Even if they can’t, thank them kindly for their time.

And always, and I mean always, be the same person that they married. I heard that phrase once and it really stuck with me: You never divorce the same person you marry. That immediately struck me as true. None of us, man or woman, are the same in hurt as we are in love. Yet that has become one of the guiding principles of my identity. I’m always me—in both hurt and love.

And I’ve had some pretty ugly moments to prove that to myself. I’ll tell you now, few things have come back round to serve me more. People that have seen me at my darkest moments or at my most vulnerable would say that I’m the same person. I’m the same me when I’m high as I am when I’m low. It’s cost me a lot of money, I’ve had lawyers tell me I’m insane. But most importantly, I’ve had allies when I’ve needed them because I’ve earned a good reputation. That doesn’t mean that I can’t be a dick, I can. But whatever level of dickhead is present in my personality is at least consistent.

3. Fuck Patience

People that are telling you to have patience are missing an opportunity to tell you something even more important—that patience will ruin you. I say that totally without irony.

Patience is the thing that's stopping you from getting what you want. You are not demanding enough out of each moment of your life. You’re not demanding big enough quantum leaps from your decisions. You’re not forcing yourself to think big enough or to move fast enough.

Good is good enough for you when you should be demanding excellence. You’re proud of your accomplishments and fail to see that that pride is slowing you down. With every bit of progress you make you get more and more likely to settle into the middle.

The more powerful you become, the better you feel and the less likely you are to demand the next quantum leap. You begin pulling ahead of your peers, but you can’t see that you’re only pulling ahead of the bottom half of the curve. You can’t see that the outliers who are actually making Big Dreams come true are racing away from you.

But there are so few of them that you let it slide. You don’t hold yourself to the standard set by Elon Musk. You’re proud of what you’ve done, and you’re patient for the big reward. You’re patient. You can always go big tomorrow. You’ve already come so far, there’s no need to keep up the breakneck pace. And that’s how patience gets you. You think it’s a virtue rather than a deadly sin—the killer of Big Dreams.

For many of you, you’re feeling pumped right now. You’re going to go out there and be brash. You’re going to prove that you can overcome a desire to be patient. But that would be a mistake.

To understand why, you first have to understand why a trusted advisor would tell you to be patient in the first place. They were telling you that because you’re thrashing around. You’re acting like you don’t understand that the way you do things will either help you or hurt you in the future.

They want you to understand that acting like a bull in a china shop will ironically actually slow you down. They want you to understand the difference between being brash and being bold. You need to be bold, but when you’re reckless, you are momentarily fast, but you leave a wake of destruction behind you—costly mistakes that aren’t learned from, potential allies that are turned into enemies. You earn a reputation for being selfish and rude. And so on, and so on.

But here’s the rub, while you have to play the long game AT ALL TIMES, you can’t EVER be patient. You must demand of yourself that you take quantum leaps forward. You must NEVER pursue 10% incremental improvements, and you must instead, go for a 10 fold improvement in speed no matter how fast you’re going.

This kind of thinking requires you to be bold—to approach things in a radically different way. And here’s the part that I really have trouble getting across—that’s the only way that you’ll ever actually make your Big Dream a reality. By screaming Fuck Patience at every turn. By understanding that while you must secretly acknowledge to yourself that your goal will take a very long time, and it will certainly test your patience, you will only actually get there if you demand quantum leaps rather than accepting that "these things take time."

You have to have a bottomless thirst for massive self-improvement. You can’t ever let little wins stop you from getting to your big wins. You must hold the two competing ideas in your head that despite your best efforts you will walk a long road before finally manifesting your Big Dream, but that if you acknowledge the need for patience you will inevitably end up walking a long road without ever reaching your destination—well-practiced patience your only reward for a life of toil.

Wowza… this got long. Thank you for letting me take one more step toward clarifying my own thinking. I hope this is as useful to you as it has been to me.