Be PATIENT - Simon Sinek (@simonsinek) - #Entspresso

Good morning, Believe Nation. My name is Evan Carmichael. My one word is believe, and I believe that entrepreneurs will solve all of the major problems of the world. So today's message is be patient. Over to you, Simon Sinek.

I talk to so many smart, fantastic, ambitious, idealistic, hardworking kids, and they're right out of college They're in their entry-level jobs, and I'll ask them, "How's it going?" And they'll say, "I think I'm gonna quit." And I'm like, "Why?" They say to me, "I'm not making an impact." I'm like, "You know you've been here 8 months, right?" They treat the sense of fulfillment or even love like it's a scavenger hunt, like it's something you look for. My millennial friends, they've gone through so many jobs. They're either getting fired— I mean, it was mutual— Or they're quitting because they're not making an impact, or they're not finding the thing they're looking for, they're not feeling fulfilled, as if it's a scavenger hunt. Love, a job you find joy from, is not something you discover. It's not like, "I found love, here it is." "I found a job I love." That's not how it works. Both of those things require hard work. You are in love because you work very hard every single day of your life to stay in love. You find a job that brings you ultimate joy because you work hard every single day to serve those around you, and you maintain that joy. It's not a discovery. But the problem is the sense of impatience. It's as if an entire generation is standing at the foot of a mountain. They know exactly what they want. They can see the summit. What they can't see is the mountain, this large immovable object. That doesn't mean you have to do your time. That's not what I'm talking about. Take a helicopter, climb, I don't care, but there's still a mountain. Life, career fulfillment, relationships are journeys. The problem is this entire generation has an institutionalized sense of impatience, and do they have the patience to go on the journey to maintain love, to feel fulfilled, or do they just quit and on to the next, dump and on to the next? Ghost and on to the next.

I'm a big fan of modeling success. I'm a big believer that you can shortcut your path to success by finding what other people have done to achieve that success, learning from them, and applying it to your own life, to your own path, to help you get there faster. I love finding shortcuts. I love finding hacks. I love finding all the productivity tools and team and everything you can do to climb that mountain faster. But to Simon's point, there is still a mountain. There's still a lot of work that has to go in. It's working smart and working hard. It's not just one or the other to go and accomplish your goal. If you look at my YouTube channel as an example, since we're watching here all together, you know, I've made 5,000 videos for this channel. 4,000 of them are public and 1,000+ of them are not. They're practice videos or demo videos or test videos. I sucked at the start. Go back and watch my first video and look how bad it is. Somebody recently left a comment on one of my videos that I recorded 5 years ago, and she said, "Oh my, Evan, look at how far you've come. 5 years later, you sound and look different in so many good ways." And that's awesome to hear and also really frustrating. You know, I am mostly the same Evan that I was 5 years ago. My belief system, my values, you know, maybe I've learned a little bit more, gained a little bit more experience. But why am I so much better now on camera than I was way back then? Well, it's because I practiced. What I had 4 or 5 years ago compared to what I have now, the difference is 5,000 videos. You know, that 1,000 videos that haven't been published, those trying and errors and failing on those 1,000 videos that never got released are more than what most people ever create. Most people who start a YouTube channel, they'll make 3, 4, 5, 10 videos and quit because it's too hard, because it's too challenging, because they don't want to climb that mountain, because they don't want to put in the work. Where here's 1,000 videos that never saw the light of day and 4,000 more that are going. Now, can you get there faster than me? Sure. You know, I'm looking at Alex, look at Lily, who've been helping me on some of the videos. They are already better than when I was when I first started. They're already better than I was maybe 1,000 videos in. You can get there faster than me. You can model success. Maybe you also have just more natural talent. You can rise the ladder faster than other people around you if you have more natural talent, if you model success, if you have a deep passion for what you're doing. You can get there faster, but it's still a long road. You still have to be patient. You still have to put in the work. I think that's what people often get too frustrated by, is they want the immediate results, they want the immediate success, and if they don't get it then they quit. And so understand that this is a deep passion of yours, is something that you want to commit potentially the rest of your life to doing because you care about it so much. Then expect to suck at the start. Expect it to take a long time. Expect to work on trying to improve your efficiency and productivity and skills and resources to get there as fast as possible. But expect to be committed and stay patient. And if you are, whether it takes you 100 videos or 5,000 videos or more, the equivalent in your industry, you'll get there. So the question of the day today is I'm curious about your reps. I'm curious how much are you putting into your business? How much are you practicing daily to get better at whatever skill it is that you have that you're bringing? I'm curious about your schedule. Leave it down in the comments below. I'm excited to see what you guys have to say. I also want to give a quick shout out to Latina. Thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word. It really, really means a lot to me, and I sincerely hope that you're enjoying the read. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. And I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of enespresso. I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going.

So a bunch, a group of really brilliant psychologists in the field of expertise research have sat down and tried to figure out How long do you have to work at something before you become really good? And the answer seems to be— it's an extraordinarily consistent answer in an incredible number of fields— and that is you need to have practiced, to have apprenticed, for 10,000 hours before you get good. So every great classical composer, without exception, composes for at least 10 years before they write their masterwork.

Mozart, 10.

Mozart is composing at 11, but he's composing garbage at 11. I mean, he doesn't produce something great until he's 22 or 23. Concerto No. 9, I think, 271. If I asked you, how long did it take you when you were doing this job before you felt comfortable and good at what you were doing?

10 years at least.

Same with me. It's an incredibly consistent finding, and it's really important because it says that we are far too impatient with people when we assess whether someone has got what it takes to do a certain job. We always want to make that assessment after 6 months or a year, or— and that's ridiculous, you know. The kinds of jobs we have people do today are sufficiently complex that they require a long time to reach mastery. And what we should be doing is setting up institutions and structures that allow people to spend the time and effort to reach mastery, not judging them prematurely.

Patience is for the impatient. That in fact, when you're getting started and your in-laws are making faces at you and you're not sure if you're gonna be able to pay the rent and you don't know why you're living in Brooklyn to begin with and you're gonna have to move back to Florida, it's easy to say, you know what, I need to go faster to pick up these scraps and pick up these scraps. And sometimes what that does is it gives you the foot up to get to the next level, but sometimes what that does is it just makes you a scrap collector. And that one of the things that we see we look at the work of people who have put really big ideas into the world, who have built online platforms, right, is that they got there by being patiently impatient or impatiently patient, whichever way you want to juxtapose it. That if you look around at the blogs you read or the people you respect online or the organizations you want to work with, the myth of the overnight success is just that, a myth. That, you know, the much-vaunted Twitter was a failure, a complete failure for 2 years. Nobody used it. And if they took the mindset of, well, if it doesn't work in 2 weeks, we got to go do something else, you never would have heard of it.

You know, China is a very special place. And if you look at the big tech companies, Apple's done very well, Microsoft hasn't lost too much, and Google's, you know, lost a lot. So there's quite a bit of variation despite all three of those being talented, long-term oriented companies. And when you look at Apple, one of the amazing things is when they did the iPhone, they negotiated and talked and built relationships for 6 years before the iPhone was allowed to come to China. So from 2005, 2011, and that took a lot of patience. And now that's one of their largest markets in the world for the iPhone. And so what we take away from that is a sense of great patience. So it may be soon that we have a license in China, or it may take a couple years, but we're gonna be very patient. And we're looking forward to a time, you know, a decade or two decades from now when the Chinese middle class will want and embrace the kind of content that we have.