The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur

December 26How to Wait

The wisest person could ask no more of Fate / Than to be simple, modest, brave, true, / Safe from the Many, honored by the Few; / To count as naught in World, or Church, or State, / But, inwardly in secret to be great; / To feel mysterious Nature ever new; / To touch, if not to grasp, its endless clue, / And learn by each discovery how to wait.

James Russell Lowell—“Jeffries Wyman” (1891)

Concepts like scrum, lean, agile, iterate, and minimally viable product (MVP) crept into the business vocabulary as ways to suggest faster ways to do things, including fail.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that idea, but stick with this a while and you'll discover the magic of waiting for the gears to align. Not to be perfect, but to be orchestrated.

From a practical perspective, patience is sort of sexy. The less desperate you seem to want a sale, the more the buyer wants you. That's a hard one but a valuable one.

Ask a question, and then be silent and wait. Bite your lip if you must, but wait.

Patience permits you to set timelines that allow for everyone's point of view and working style.

Go stomping through the subalpine woods and you'll never see a wild animal. Go quietly, sit quietly, and wait. And (as long as you're not wearing some hideous fragrance), mule deer, moose, alpine chickadees, and maybe even a pika or two scrambling in the rocks may wander within feet of you. (A black bear may as well, but that's the risk of all of this.)

Today, as you have ...