Patience makes time your greatest asset. It will work for you, not against you.
Saw this on Twitter: The greatest threat to results is impatience. If you let it, a tiny daily advantage will compound into a massive generational one. A lack of patience changes the outcome.
Who am I around? What are they doing to me? Is that okay?
Friends are such a major influence on your life and what happens to you.
You are the sum of your five closest friends.
I was a young leader. I was the president of my high school and college. I was an officer in the Air Force and put in charge of 23 people… at only 22 years old. I made a lot of mistakes, and if I could go back and give some advice to my younger self, this is what I would say:
A title is not authority. Just because you are “in charge” doesn’t mean you are actually in charge. If you want to lead, you have to earn credibility over time, especially if you’re a young leader. How do you earn credibility and followers?
When you choose to start something, you have to train yourself to also finishing it. It is one choice, not two. You chose to start this, so you also chose to finish it.
This was a hard lesson for me to learn and profoundly important in pretty much every aspect of my life. My friends used to joke that I was a “parallel” entrepreneur because I started two or three companies at the same time. I would take on any project without giving much thought to how I would finish it, or how I might be overwhelmed in the pursuit of too many goals. I ended up scattered and unfocused, just trying to keep up with the demands that I signed up for. It was an unsatisfactory life and taught me a crucial lesson. If I didn’t escape this trap, it would have doomed me to a mediocre life.
As Steve Jobs said, we are in our own reality distortion field. We see the world through our own lens, with unconscious biases and perspectives. What you don’t know about yourself will doom you to failure. Want to be a better leader? Want to be a great entrepreneur? Want to be a better parent? Want to be better person? Then you have to become an expert at soliciting feedback. I say expert because this is a learned skill that takes many years to master. The reason being is it’s VERY hard to hear feedback. It’s hard to hear that you have weaknesses and you have to work on improving yourself. It take courage and thick skin and the ability to keep the end – your improvement – at the top of your mind. On the other side of the table, it’s VERY hard for other people to give you honest feedback. They don’t want to hurt your feelings, even though some things you do may really bother them.
How to get honest feedback:
You will only have a handful of mega opportunities in your life, and they won’t hang around for long. That million dollar idea you had yesterday may be gone tomorrow. That job offer that is the dream job but requires you to move across the country expires in a week. That real estate deal might be off the market in six hours. These opportunities will come your way maybe once a decade. Which means that the vast majority of your time will be spent preparing for opportunity. The more you work and the harder you prepare, the more equipped you will be to capitalize on these opportunities. Will you be ready? Will you be able to identify the opportunity let alone seize the day? Will your preparation be enough?
Assets make your rich.
The first step to getting rich is knowing the difference between liabilities and assets. Liabilities take money out of your pocket, Assets put money into your pocket. By investing in assets, you are investing into your future earnings. The key is to do this early, in your 20s. The simple formula to get rich is to live cheaply in your 20s and 30s and use your savings to purchase assets that will produce income for the rest of your life. It compounds over time, so your earnings from your assets can be used to purchase other assets. This pattern of savings and investing isn’t a forever thing, only until you can support your ideal lifestyle. The not rich will spend all of their earnings on liabilities, and they spend before they really have the income to support the purchases.
Suggested reading: Rich Dad, Poor Dad
As far as your work life goes, the most important thing to learn in life is how to change and adapt. Yes, the skills you have in an industry are important. But the most important skill is the ability to level up and adapt. So if your job gets eliminated or your industry gets decimated, it’s not a big deal for you to start again in a new industry.
What’s interesting is, when you are young, you can learn these skills by doing just about anything. My sister was talking about how she wants Eli to become a pilot. My initial reaction to this was maybe it’s not a good idea because I don’t think there will be pilots in 20 years. When I asked a friend’s opinion, he immediately said, “the most important thing is to learn how to change.” I thought this was very wise. That being the case, chase your passions to your hearts content. If you really dig in and commit, you will learn the skills you need to do anything in life.
One quirk of human nature is when we something happens to us or in the world we are so fast to come up with a explanation. This explanation is usually black or white, and usually dramatically oversimplifies the situation. Why did that ship sink? The captain crashed the boat. A more current example: Why did chaos erupt when we left Afghanistan? Because the President abruptly pulled our military presence out.
One interesting thing here is, when something goes wrong, the simplified solution we usually come up with is to blame the person rather than the situation (i.e., fundamental attribution error).
I’ve noticed this to be a universal quirk of human nature. Everyone does it, no matter the background.
But complicated situations or events almost NEVER have simple explanations. The reality is usually incredibly messy and convoluted, with a tremendous number of confounding factors. It’s a mistake to demonize a person or one factor without fully understanding a situation. Defer judgement and keep an open mind. You might be surprised with the reality of the situation, and if you jump to conclusions it will be impossible to understand the root cause.
When times get tough, you should ask yourself, “What kind of person am I?” Am I the kind of person who gives up? Who backs down? Or am I the kind of person who will step up to the challenge? Am I the kind of person who will persevere? I find that the simple act of asking myself that question is often enough to propel me forward and get me to “Walk through the fire.”
Will you be a finisher and be proud of what you’ve accomplished? Or will you quit and regret it the rest of your life?