It took us 9 months to grow from a single cell into a baby and yet another 20 years or so to grow into an adult human being; a cell by cell, and a day by day.
The growth was that slow that it passed by unnoticed. Only when we look at our old pictures, we realize how little were we.
Nature offers us numerous other examples of patience.
How long does it take to carve a cannon or to build an island from an active volcano?
There are countless human examples of patience as well. Joyce spent 8 years writing Ulysses. It took decades from the Right’s brothers first airplane to the first commercial flight overseas.
Yet, today, we live in a world where everything is just one click, or one tap away and we want our results to show up just as quickly.
We want to lose weight and get fit in 28 days, and we don’t realize that most athletes have been working out for at least a decade.
We want to go from 0 to 1 million subscribers in a year without investing much work, and we don’t realize that Casey Neistat has been publishing videos for 5 years before reaching that milestone.
We want to become an overnight success because someone else accomplished something like that, and we don’t count in years of failures and working, showing up, without any results.
If someone can promise you that if you show up every day, for the next 10 years, and do the work you love, you will become successful, are you willing to do it?
It is much more difficult and requires much more patience than finding a quick fix, a magic pill, a holy grail which will boost you to the top, but it’s also much more likely to happen.