When doing nothing is everything

Patiently waiting and doing nothing is the hardest thing I do. Most often I fail at it. While my impatient actions may not have a negative impact on the desired outcome, it is the frustration associated with delayed reactions from continuous inconsequential actions that gets to me. I anger, I victimize myself, I deflect blame and act irrationally.

When enough time has passed, slowly, too slowly, I am able to look back at the situation. 20/20 hindsight and my toddler-like ability to connect the dots allow me to deduce which actions led to the desired outcome. That epiphany, in turn, leads to disappointment for all the time vested and wasted towards unfruitful attempts.

What I often forget is that business, family, and friends all require The Compound Effect. That is to say, it is not one grand gesture that wins the heart, it is through the compounding of smaller increments. The author, Darren Hardy, provides a clever metaphor for our impatience towards the compound effect – he explains it as our desire to keep turning that hot water knob while impatiently waiting for the right water temperature. For me, that outcome is almost always a good reminder to be patient.

In other scenarios, it is not as apparent as burning skin. So, I have built a framework for myself. Not necessarily a solution, just an over analytically derived step-by-step guide to stay patient.

Realization and Acceptance

The framework starts with a reminder to myself and acceptance of who I am. I, like most in my circle, am a builder and a technician – a DIM (do-it-myself) entrepreneur. Doing something, even if it’s chaotically and frantically pedaling, is an innate trait.

Expect latency and account for it

Next, acknowledge that The wait is where it’s at – the delay between action and response. Making quick decisions solely for the sake of moving fast is only fruitful if I am patient enough to wait for enough data (or the right data) to reveal itself, allowing me to base the next decision off of it. There are essentially three types of latencies I account for:

• Time bound latency: Setting a specific time-based event to delay making the next decision.
• Data bound latency: Setting a specific data threshold to delay further analysis.
• Accountability bound latency: Entrusting someone else to be accountable for further changes, follow-up decisions, or even making the decision to pull me back in.

Puzzle vs Mystery

Call it manifesting or wishful thinking. A question I started asking myself is “What does ‘done’ look like?” Answering this requires understanding if we’re solving a puzzle or deciphering a mystery.

Solve a Puzzle -> Actionable Insights -> Next Steps

Decipher a Mystery -> Identified Patterns -> Further Analysis

As I’ve grown more and more accustomed to thinking in puzzles and mysteries. I generally jump to asking “Will decoding this (Puzzle or Mystery) lead to actionable insights for me to make changes or will it simply lead me to identifying more of the unknown?” Setting clear expectations with myself helps avoid future heartache and unnecessary dwelling over what I cannot control. And, because of that cognition, patience becomes a mere necessity and not an unachievable virtue.

Mind mapping Outcomes

If this, then that. This is a cheat of sorts. I only do this if it is a Mystery with multiple predictable outcomes. A tool like Coggle or FigJam to mind-map predictable outcomes. In most cases, the real outcome does land tangentially close to one of the predictions to get a head start on the next set of decisions and actions.

Conclusion

There’s only so much planning you can do before you eventually take the leap and test against your assumptions. As an entrepreneur and business owner, it is a harsh realization that my engineering mindset is actually a curse. A challenging innate persona of who I need to be most of the time – a patient observer, and the framework above helps me to be one.