Active Patience

Wait without waiting

Active Patience is a concept I heard a few years ago that stuck with me.

Interestingly, it’s not the active patience concept that you get if you search this time, which instead is on Farnum Street (Shane Parrish’s great website & podcast);

To me, this is more of a definition of intentional operational slack, which I’ll do an entire other post on in the future.

Instead active patience for me is a concept that concerns “what to do when waiting between lag-times of extremely important projects”.

Imagine you know that building this “new project” is the way forward, but maybe its taking a long time (because it’s good).

You could be waiting on web devs or legal or inventory, pretty much anything.

What a lot of people do is look into other projects during this time that could be other opportunities.

This is also what I did….

And it’s a mistake.

Because doing 1 thing better than everyone else is the absolutely key.

If you look into different projects, the issue is mental energy becomes split up, and it’s not a 1+1=2 situation, it’s a 1+1=1.2 situation, because if you split focus, all the little-wins go away.

It’s better to spend 500 hours to make 1 great thing than 50 hours to make 10 “good” things.

You will get paid 100X more for that one great thing than the 10 good ones, and it’ll be easier to sell in the process.

This goes for books, products, courses, businesses.

It’s also something I don’t live by, but trying to get better…

But what has this got to do with active patience.

So let’s say you’re building a SAAS company and most of your work will happen once the product launches, you’ve done all your research, all your cold outreach is ready, ads are ready, essentially you are ready to go, but you are waiting on developers to be completed and they’ve said 3 months.

What do you do?

Now, you could look to carry on on the planning stage but there’s not really anything else you can do until you start to get some feedback on the product itself, so instead you look into other opportunities.

You start to build this little side gig just because you have all this dead time anyway.

Massive mistake.

Or you think to yourself, I’m just going to wait around for this product to be ready, catch up on some Netflix, another mistake.

In either case we’re optimising for the wrong thing.

In the first this is active distraction.

In the second example this is passive patience.

Both have pros and cons but vs your primary goal (the main, ONE THING), they are not good.

The reason, the first, active distraction - what happens if this actually works “OK” or even “good”.

It’s your first business and you get up to £2k/month profit within 3 months.

Amazing!

Except, now the product is ready, so…. Time to work 12 hours/day on something that generates nothing…

It’s mentally tough to do.

And hence you start splitting focus, and quality (of both projects decreases).

The other example “passive patience” is just laziness.

You are building bad habits in a season just before you need to have real proactivity.

Instead, try the active patience approach.

Learn new skills, ones that aren’t fully aligned but might be in the future.

Take a travelling trip, learn something.

Improve health and fitness, get into good habits instead that can run alongside the new approach.

All in all, be active but not where your active will interfere with the project once it’s time to continue or start.

Understand this is a different season of your journey or life.

Cheers,

Thomas.