The Importance of Patience: How to Build a Legacy

Patience. Be patient.

Stay patient.

Patience.

Be patient.

Patience.

Be patient.

Patience.

Hello, Believe Nation. Today we're going to talk about how you can be patient. And as always, if you hear something that really, really resonates with you, please leave it in the comments below and put quotes around it so other people can be inspired as well. Enjoy.

Patience is for the impatient. That in fact, when you're getting started and your in-laws are making face faces at you and you're not sure if you're going to be able to pay the rent and you don't know why you're living in Brooklyn to begin with and you're going to 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 when 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, where I come from, people are very passionate, hot-blooded.

They want it, they want it now. I need it right away.

Everyone's looking for a shortcut.

But sometimes, it's—

sometimes an indirect route is the quickest way to get there. Sometimes you got to take a little longer to achieve the things you want to achieve in life.

Don't be in a hurry.

Be patient.

Be patient.

Everybody wants everything now.

We live in a society where it's instant gratification.

Instagram is this.

Be patient.

It was kind of tough knowing that sometimes I would work so hard and everybody else, and I wasn't seeing, I wasn't reaping the benefits of it, and I wasn't getting any better as quickly as I wanted to, but I stayed patient, and that was one big thing for me is knowing when to stay patient, that everything's gonna come around. And I think that, you know, with that patience I gained as a kid is helping me in the NBA right now. So, you know, for me, it's just, you know, always, always working hard and always trying to get better and knowing that I can get better, knowing that, you know, I didn't get to— I'm not there where I want to be yet. So I have a long ways to go.

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, right? And the answer seems to be it's There's an extraordinary 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. Um, if I asked you, how long did it take you when you were doing this job before you felt comfortable you were doing?

10 years at least.

10 years. Same with me, right? I mean, 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, 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 effort to reach mastery, not judging them prematurely.

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 going to 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 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 this 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've learned over the years that, you know, with anything you have to be patient. Not 5 years patient or 5, you know, 5 months patient, you know, you could be 10 years patient if you want to, you know, empires aren't built overnight. Overnight, you know what I mean? Like I always tell everybody, the Great Wall was a 2,000-year-old plan. 2,000, you know how many lifetimes that is of one plan? You know, and getting people to kind of, you know, do the same, have the same exact agenda for lifetimes, for generations, that's crazy. So, you know, you have to be patient when you want to do something significant, no matter what. And a lot of time that means, you know, not reaping the benefits of something immediately, you know, and, and that's the test.

Dedicate a certain amount of time to the business. 2 hours a week, 4 hours a week, 50 hours a week. No matter what, it starts to compound after the year 1, after year 2, after year 3. If you dedicated 2 hours a week to, you know, this new hobby or love or, you know, business, you know, at the end of the year it's over 100 hours put in. Don't be in a rush. First of all, learn all the mistakes early, and then have some kind of strategy. Know that this is where you want to be after year 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. And you have to really be honest with yourself. Is the business worth it? Is it costing too much? Because you'll know.

So, you know, Charlie Munger likes to say that you don't make money when you buy stocks, and you don't make money when you sell stocks. You make money by waiting. And so the biggest, the single biggest advantage a value investor has is not IQ, it's patience and waiting. Waiting for the right pitch and waiting for many years for the right pitch.

There's a phrase in the Bible that's become kind of an expression called "suffer fools gladly." And somehow in our modern world it got totally inverted, which is something that kind of bothers me. The original expression meant that you're constantly surrounded by fools. Half the world are fools, or whatever the percentage is, and maybe you're a bit of a fool, and what you need to do is you need to suck— you need to be able to put up with fools and laugh at them and not take them seriously. That's what it means in the Bible, and that's the wisdom in the Bible. And then somehow it got turned around in modern times where, where it seems to be a virtue that you don't suffer fools gladly, that you don't put up with them, that you get angry about them, that you confront them, that you try to change them, and on and on and on and on and on. And the idea that I try and say— it's part of my chapter on social intelligence, which is I'm trying to tell you that you're not going to be a master in this world unless you know how to get along with people. We're social animals. You can't just be a nerd, a tech guy that has no contact with people. You have to learn how to be with people and be socially intelligent. And it's actually a beautiful form of intelligence. And one of the aspects is to learn how to suffer fools gladly. And I tell you what I think a fool is. A fool is somebody that doesn't have the right kind of sense of priorities. In life. They magnify the little things that we should just not worry about into some huge dramatic thing, and the huge dramatic things they completely ignore. They have no sense of proportion, and we encounter them every day in our lives. And in fact, we encounter a little— a bit of them in ourselves. We all have a foolish side. So let's all be patient with fools. If you try and change them or fight them, you're only going waste valuable time and energy in your short life. Learn to laugh at them, learn to know it's part of the human comedy. I find that that's going to save you energy in the end. And I have stories in there of how not only do you suffer fools gladly, but you turn it around to an advantage. So I have a story in there of Daniel Everett, who's a great kind of anthropologist and linguist. And he came out with a radical new theory on linguistics, and suddenly he finds himself being attacked by everyone in the field. But they're attacking him in this ad hominem manner, as if he's a charlatan. They're not attacking his ideas, and it's driving him crazy. And now he's dealing with fools. And he decides that what he's gonna do is he's gonna turn it to his advantage. He's gonna make sure now, from now on, that anything he presents in a book or a lecture is airtight. They would usually pinpoint one little small thing in something he said that could be inconsistent and say, therefore, your whole theory is wrong. Okay, from now on, I'm not going to make anything inconsistent. So he took the foolish aspect of these attacks and he decided he would make— it would make him stronger and would make his ideas stronger. That's what suffer fools gladly is about. And I have other examples there in the book.

That is not going to happen as quickly as you want it to happen. A lot of things are going to happen that will catch you off guard, and so therefore you've got to deal with and handle it as it comes. And not only that, but that faith and patience drives you into action. You've got to keep moving and keep plugging away. In the Far East, they have something that's called the Chinese bamboo tree. The Chinese bamboo tree takes 5 years to grow, and when they go through a process of growing it, they have to water and fertilize the ground where it is every day, and it doesn't break through the ground until the 5th year. Okay. But once it breaks through the ground, within 5 weeks it grows 90 feet tall. Now the question is, does it grow 90 feet tall in 5 weeks or 5 years? The answer is obvious. It grows 90 feet tall in 5 years, because at any time had that person stopped watering and nurturing and fertilizing that dream, that bamboo tree would have died in the ground. And I can see people coming out talking to a guy out there watering and fertilizing the ground that's not showing anything. Hey, what you doing? You've been out here a long time, man. And the conversation in the neighborhood is You growing a Chinese bamboo tree, is that right? Yeah, that's right. Well, uh, even Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder can see ain't nothing showing. You know that's how people gonna do you. So how long you been working on this? How long have you been working on your dreams and you have nothing to show? This is all you got to show? People gonna do that to you. And some people, ladies and gentlemen, they stop. Because they don't see instant results. It doesn't happen quickly. They stop. Oh no, no, no, no, you got to keep on watering your dream. And when it began to happen, they stopped laughing. They said, look, whoa, look, look here, it's— look out, hey man, you know, I know you could do it. Look here, you got a job here.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed. I'd love to know what did you think. Did you like the video? What did you pull from it? What was your favorite thought? Are you patient enough in your business? Leave all that in the comments below. Let me know what you think. I'm gonna join in the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.