September 19, 2023 • 13 mins
Have you ever wondered how our digital age's obsession with instant gratification is impacting our businesses, our goals, and our patience?
This week I take a quick look at the change technology has wrought and how it's influencing our expectations in life and in biz. I share my philosophy on the concept of "active patience," a practice that combines consistent efforts towards our goals while understanding that real success takes time.
I then share my absolute favourite metaphor -- the story of the Chinese Bamboo Tree. Through it we learn that patience, when combined with consistent efforts, can reap enormous rewards. Tune in to this episode for a nuanced take on the importance of patience in our businesses and our lives. You will leave with a renewed understanding of the role patience plays in our success and how to incorporate 'active patience' into your work ethic.
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The Business Blasphemy Podcast is sponsored by Corporate Rehab® Strategic Consulting.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to the Business Blast for Me podcast,
where we question the sacredtruths of the online business
space and the reverence withwhich they're held.
I'm your host, sarah Kahnspeaker, strategic consultant
and BS busting badass.
Join me each week as wechallenge the norms, trends and
overall bullshit status quo ofentrepreneurship to uncover what
it really takes to build thebusiness that you want to build
(00:23):
in a way that honors you, yourlife and your vision for what's
possible, and maybe piss off afew gurus along the way.
So if you're ready to commitbusiness class for me, let's do
it.
Hello, hello, blasphemers.
You know I remember I'm totallydating myself.
I remember a time before theinternet, a time before we had
(00:49):
instant access to literallyeverything.
I remember a time of having towait to find information or to
literally do anything, didn'tknow the answer to something, go
to the library and look underthe damn Dewey Decimal System to
find a book and then hope thebook had the information in it.
You'd have to go to the indexand search the key terms and you
(01:12):
know it was a long, drawn outprocess and if you had the
encyclopedia Britannica, youwere really, really cool but
didn't realize how quickly thatinformation became outdated.
If you wanted to know how toget somewhere, you had to find
someone who either knew the wayor you had to go to the
drugstore or a gas station andbuy a physical map of the place
and then chart a path.
(01:32):
We were really excited whenMapQuest became a thing, but
that was after the internet wasinvented.
Want to let someone know youlike them?
You couldn't just send them amessage on DMs or on TikTok or
whatever the kids do nowadays.
You had to wait until Fridaynight when the radio DJ did a
request show and you had torequest a song and hope that
(01:54):
your crush was listening andthat they got your really vague
attempt to let you know that youliked them by playing a song
that you liked and you whatever.
I mean, I never did that, butobviously this was a thing Like
what I'm trying to say here isshit took time, but we knew that
it did.
The internet changed everything,but even when it began we had
(02:18):
to wait.
I remember when we firststarted to log on to things like
bulletin boards and MSNmessenger and a like I was at my
space.
I mean those were iterationsthat came after but the dial up
modem.
You had to wait minutes, actualminutes.
We would burn a CD and it wouldtake sometimes two, three, four
hours, depending on how fastyour speed was.
(02:39):
Things took time and we had towait.
Then it started to get fasterand faster and faster and now we
have freaking supercomputers inour pockets and we have
forgotten what it's like to haveto wait for anything.
Just this morning I was gettingmy daughter ready for school and
(02:59):
I wanted to know what theweather was going to be like.
So, instead of waiting the 37seconds it would have taken to
get her socks on and go to myphone and look on my weather app
, which is actually a widget onmy home screen I asked Alexa to
tell me what the weather was.
Hey, Alexa, what's the weathertoday?
We have forgotten what delayedgratification is.
(03:20):
Because we've become so used toinstant gratification, we expect
things to happen immediately.
We have lost patience.
We have lost the ability to sitin the unknown.
We have lost that comfort indiscomfort, and I can't begin to
tell you how critical that isto be able to do, to sit in a
(03:42):
space of just not knowing andthen allowing your brain to
figure out how to figure it out.
What do we do now?
When we don't know something,google it.
What do we do now?
We Google it, we Google it, weGoogle it.
I mean, even my five-year-oldknows.
Oh, I'm wondering about this.
I'm going to go and ask Googleabout it.
Like, yeah, it's totallyconvenient and it's wonderful
and at the same time, it'sabsolutely terrible because it
(04:05):
is making us, a lose our abilityto actually figure things out,
but, b, it's also making itreally hard for people to
emotionally regulate when thingsdon't happen immediately.
We have a very skewedexpectation of how long things
take and it's bleeding over intobusiness and I'm going to tell
(04:26):
you it's jacking y'all up.
Too many business owners are inthe space and they put out some
social content about an offerand if people don't respond
immediately, if they don'timmediately get people signing
up or they don't immediately getnew followers, they think
something's wrong and they pivotor they try again, or they try
(04:46):
a new thing, or they blame theiroffer.
Like, there's so many thingsthat happen that don't
necessarily need to happen.
We have just lost patience withit.
We've lost the ability to sitin the discomfort of not knowing
what's going to happen next.
I remember when I used to teachand I think I've told this story
maybe before, I don't know.
(05:07):
Everything kind of blendstogether when you talk a lot,
but I used to teach acommunications course in college
and what I would you know.
This was usually happeningaround the time where I was
teaching, like how to go to jobinterviews and how to
communicate effectively, and oneof the things I always did was
I would start talking and then Iwould just stop and I would
wait and I tell you no lies.
(05:30):
Every single time and I didthis for probably eight years in
a row Every single timesomebody broke the silence
before we hit the seven secondmark, it's true, they would
either giggle or they would saysomething to fill the sounds.
Why?
Because we are veryuncomfortable with the unknown.
(05:53):
When people stop talking andthere's silence, we immediately
get uncomfortable.
So it's this space that we'veall kind of grown really
unaccustomed to, and it's thispause right, this having to wait
for things, having to figurethings out.
So what I wanted to share todaywas the concept of what I call
(06:14):
active patience.
Active patience A lot of peoplewill preach patience, right,
and they'll people think that,okay, you know, you just be
patient and good things come tothose who wait and blah, blah
blah.
But I think there's a littlebit of a misunderstanding around
the concept of patience.
So I like the idea of activepatience and what this is is
(06:34):
working as hard as you can likewithin your allowed capacity.
Within your you know whatyou're able to actually do.
Working as hard as you cantoward your goal every single
day, While still acknowledgingthat it's going to take time.
All right, let me say thatagain Active patience is working
as hard as you can, within yourcapacity, toward your goal
every single day, while stillacknowledging that it's going to
(06:57):
take time.
Where people go wrong withpatience is thinking that they
can chill right and their goalswill eventually happen if they
wait long enough.
They call it faith, they callit mindset, they call it
believing in oneself, likewhatever they want.
That's not how it works.
You still have to do the work,but where we run into problems
is well, how long do I have todo the work for?
(07:19):
And nobody can say for sure,because every single person's
circumstance is different,depending on how much time you
have, what access you have tocertain resources, how much
knowledge you have, where maybeyou have gaps in your knowledge
or understanding are you able toimplement, like there are a
whole bunch of different factorsthat come into play that are
going to dictate how longsomething takes.
(07:42):
All you can do is keep workingtoward it.
You have to be active, but youalso have to be patient, and
that's why I call it activepatience, and that's really all
I want to say is we really needto start understanding that
things don't happen in thetimeframe that we want them to,
because we do have a very skewedsense of time.
(08:04):
Now, before I wrap this week'svery quick episode, I want to
share a story with you, and I'veshared this story in multiple
classes that I've done over theyears.
I've shared this on theinternet before, on my reels.
I think I've shared it onFacebook before, but I want to
share it with you because thisstory, for me, was a huge aha
moment.
It really made me understandthat time is something that you
(08:29):
really don't have any controlover.
What you do have control overis your output, and it's the
story of the Chinese bamboo tree.
The Chinese bamboo tree has aseed so hard that when you plant
it, it'll do nothing for almostfive years.
Okay, I want you to think aboutthat.
Five years, we're about threeand a half years post COVID and
(08:52):
it feels like a long freakingtime.
Five years give or take, itdoes nothing.
So that's right.
Nothing happens in year one,nothing happens in year two,
nothing happens in year three orfour.
You care for and water the seedfor over 1400 days and nothing
(09:12):
happens.
And then, at some point in thefifth year, in the fifth year
five years the seed breaksthrough the soil and begins to
grow into a tree.
In fact, the Chinese bambootree has been recorded at
growing almost three feet a day.
A day, that is almost 90 feet,nine zero feet in a month.
(09:37):
And it has actually been timedat growing nearly one inch every
40 minutes.
So once it actually emerges,the growth is just insanely fast
.
Right, but here's the kicker If, at any point, any point during
those first four plus years,the person who planted the seed
(10:00):
had stopped watering it,nurturing it, caring for it and
we're talking daily, dailywatering, daily fertilizing,
daily caring for the ground andsoil around the seed If they had
not done that at any point inthose four plus years, that seed
would have died.
I don't have to point out theparallels to your own goals and
(10:22):
dreams, but I will.
The day that you plant the seedis not the same day you see it
sprout.
The magic happens in theconsistency Active patience,
water the seed, nurture the seed, nurture the environment around
it.
Have faith, but keep workingtoward it and you know what you
(10:45):
will see growth.
But again, there are so manyfactors at play and how long it
takes.
Now, weirdly, the parallel is alittle bit more accurate in the
sense that most people will seesome kind of really big growth
in and around year five ofentrepreneurship.
But that's also not a given,just like having content out
(11:07):
there for 90 days solid is not agiven.
These are benchmarks, these aretime frames that we give in
general, but everything has itsown time, everything has its own
season.
And so if you have been outthere and you can honestly say
to yourself that you have beennurturing your seeds, that you
planted consistently, that youdidn't give up because you
(11:30):
didn't see something quicklyenough, that you didn't give up
because you got bored or youdidn't wanna have to wait, as
long as you're having to wait,if you can honestly say to
yourself I have nurtured it andI have cared for it and I
planted those seeds and Ibelieve that they're gonna grow
and I'm just gonna keep doingthe work that I know I need to
do.
Then you're good Active,patience, working as hard as you
(11:54):
can, within your allowedcapacity, toward your goal every
single day, while stillacknowledging it's gonna take
time and all you can control isyour output.
That's it.
That's all I've got.
But if that isn't one hell of alesson, I don't know what is.
As always, you can have successwithout the BS.
(12:15):
We're in this together.
I'll talk to you soon.
That's it for this week.
Thanks for listening to theBusiness Blast for Me podcast.
We'll be back next week with anew episode, but in the meantime
, help assist throughout bysubscribing and, if you're
feeling extra sassy, rating thispodcast, and don't forget to
share the podcast with others.
Head over toBusinessBlastforMepodcastcom to
(12:36):
connect with us and learn more.
Thanks for listening andremember you can have success
without the BS.
Welcome to the Business Blast for Me podcast,
where we question the sacredtruths of the online business
space and the reverence withwhich they're held.
I'm your host, sarah Kahnspeaker, strategic consultant
and BS busting badass.
Join me each week as wechallenge the norms, trends and
overall bullshit status quo ofentrepreneurship to uncover what
it really takes to build thebusiness that you want to build
(00:23):
in a way that honors you, yourlife and your vision for what's
possible, and maybe piss off afew gurus along the way.
So if you're ready to commitbusiness class for me, let's do
it.
Hello, hello, blasphemers.
You know I remember I'm totallydating myself.
I remember a time before theinternet, a time before we had
(00:49):
instant access to literallyeverything.
I remember a time of having towait to find information or to
literally do anything, didn'tknow the answer to something, go
to the library and look underthe damn Dewey Decimal System to
find a book and then hope thebook had the information in it.
You'd have to go to the indexand search the key terms and you
(01:12):
know it was a long, drawn outprocess and if you had the
encyclopedia Britannica, youwere really, really cool but
didn't realize how quickly thatinformation became outdated.
If you wanted to know how toget somewhere, you had to find
someone who either knew the wayor you had to go to the
drugstore or a gas station andbuy a physical map of the place
and then chart a path.
(01:32):
We were really excited whenMapQuest became a thing, but
that was after the internet wasinvented.
Want to let someone know youlike them?
You couldn't just send them amessage on DMs or on TikTok or
whatever the kids do nowadays.
You had to wait until Fridaynight when the radio DJ did a
request show and you had torequest a song and hope that
(01:54):
your crush was listening andthat they got your really vague
attempt to let you know that youliked them by playing a song
that you liked and you whatever.
I mean, I never did that, butobviously this was a thing Like
what I'm trying to say here isshit took time, but we knew that
it did.
The internet changed everything,but even when it began we had
(02:18):
to wait.
I remember when we firststarted to log on to things like
bulletin boards and MSNmessenger and a like I was at my
space.
I mean those were iterationsthat came after but the dial up
modem.
You had to wait minutes, actualminutes.
We would burn a CD and it wouldtake sometimes two, three, four
hours, depending on how fastyour speed was.
(02:39):
Things took time and we had towait.
Then it started to get fasterand faster and faster and now we
have freaking supercomputers inour pockets and we have
forgotten what it's like to haveto wait for anything.
Just this morning I was gettingmy daughter ready for school and
(02:59):
I wanted to know what theweather was going to be like.
So, instead of waiting the 37seconds it would have taken to
get her socks on and go to myphone and look on my weather app
, which is actually a widget onmy home screen I asked Alexa to
tell me what the weather was.
Hey, Alexa, what's the weathertoday?
We have forgotten what delayedgratification is.
(03:20):
Because we've become so used toinstant gratification, we expect
things to happen immediately.
We have lost patience.
We have lost the ability to sitin the unknown.
We have lost that comfort indiscomfort, and I can't begin to
tell you how critical that isto be able to do, to sit in a
(03:42):
space of just not knowing andthen allowing your brain to
figure out how to figure it out.
What do we do now?
When we don't know something,google it.
What do we do now?
We Google it, we Google it, weGoogle it.
I mean, even my five-year-oldknows.
Oh, I'm wondering about this.
I'm going to go and ask Googleabout it.
Like, yeah, it's totallyconvenient and it's wonderful
and at the same time, it'sabsolutely terrible because it
(04:05):
is making us, a lose our abilityto actually figure things out,
but, b, it's also making itreally hard for people to
emotionally regulate when thingsdon't happen immediately.
We have a very skewedexpectation of how long things
take and it's bleeding over intobusiness and I'm going to tell
(04:26):
you it's jacking y'all up.
Too many business owners are inthe space and they put out some
social content about an offerand if people don't respond
immediately, if they don'timmediately get people signing
up or they don't immediately getnew followers, they think
something's wrong and they pivotor they try again, or they try
(04:46):
a new thing, or they blame theiroffer.
Like, there's so many thingsthat happen that don't
necessarily need to happen.
We have just lost patience withit.
We've lost the ability to sitin the discomfort of not knowing
what's going to happen next.
I remember when I used to teachand I think I've told this story
maybe before, I don't know.
(05:07):
Everything kind of blendstogether when you talk a lot,
but I used to teach acommunications course in college
and what I would you know.
This was usually happeningaround the time where I was
teaching, like how to go to jobinterviews and how to
communicate effectively, and oneof the things I always did was
I would start talking and then Iwould just stop and I would
wait and I tell you no lies.
(05:30):
Every single time and I didthis for probably eight years in
a row Every single timesomebody broke the silence
before we hit the seven secondmark, it's true, they would
either giggle or they would saysomething to fill the sounds.
Why?
Because we are veryuncomfortable with the unknown.
(05:53):
When people stop talking andthere's silence, we immediately
get uncomfortable.
So it's this space that we'veall kind of grown really
unaccustomed to, and it's thispause right, this having to wait
for things, having to figurethings out.
So what I wanted to share todaywas the concept of what I call
(06:14):
active patience.
Active patience A lot of peoplewill preach patience, right,
and they'll people think that,okay, you know, you just be
patient and good things come tothose who wait and blah, blah
blah.
But I think there's a littlebit of a misunderstanding around
the concept of patience.
So I like the idea of activepatience and what this is is
(06:34):
working as hard as you can likewithin your allowed capacity.
Within your you know whatyou're able to actually do.
Working as hard as you cantoward your goal every single
day, While still acknowledgingthat it's going to take time.
All right, let me say thatagain Active patience is working
as hard as you can, within yourcapacity, toward your goal
every single day, while stillacknowledging that it's going to
(06:57):
take time.
Where people go wrong withpatience is thinking that they
can chill right and their goalswill eventually happen if they
wait long enough.
They call it faith, they callit mindset, they call it
believing in oneself, likewhatever they want.
That's not how it works.
You still have to do the work,but where we run into problems
is well, how long do I have todo the work for?
(07:19):
And nobody can say for sure,because every single person's
circumstance is different,depending on how much time you
have, what access you have tocertain resources, how much
knowledge you have, where maybeyou have gaps in your knowledge
or understanding are you able toimplement, like there are a
whole bunch of different factorsthat come into play that are
going to dictate how longsomething takes.
(07:42):
All you can do is keep workingtoward it.
You have to be active, but youalso have to be patient, and
that's why I call it activepatience, and that's really all
I want to say is we really needto start understanding that
things don't happen in thetimeframe that we want them to,
because we do have a very skewedsense of time.
(08:04):
Now, before I wrap this week'svery quick episode, I want to
share a story with you, and I'veshared this story in multiple
classes that I've done over theyears.
I've shared this on theinternet before, on my reels.
I think I've shared it onFacebook before, but I want to
share it with you because thisstory, for me, was a huge aha
moment.
It really made me understandthat time is something that you
(08:29):
really don't have any controlover.
What you do have control overis your output, and it's the
story of the Chinese bamboo tree.
The Chinese bamboo tree has aseed so hard that when you plant
it, it'll do nothing for almostfive years.
Okay, I want you to think aboutthat.
Five years, we're about threeand a half years post COVID and
(08:52):
it feels like a long freakingtime.
Five years give or take, itdoes nothing.
So that's right.
Nothing happens in year one,nothing happens in year two,
nothing happens in year three orfour.
You care for and water the seedfor over 1400 days and nothing
(09:12):
happens.
And then, at some point in thefifth year, in the fifth year
five years the seed breaksthrough the soil and begins to
grow into a tree.
In fact, the Chinese bambootree has been recorded at
growing almost three feet a day.
A day, that is almost 90 feet,nine zero feet in a month.
(09:37):
And it has actually been timedat growing nearly one inch every
40 minutes.
So once it actually emerges,the growth is just insanely fast
.
Right, but here's the kicker If, at any point, any point during
those first four plus years,the person who planted the seed
(10:00):
had stopped watering it,nurturing it, caring for it and
we're talking daily, dailywatering, daily fertilizing,
daily caring for the ground andsoil around the seed If they had
not done that at any point inthose four plus years, that seed
would have died.
I don't have to point out theparallels to your own goals and
(10:22):
dreams, but I will.
The day that you plant the seedis not the same day you see it
sprout.
The magic happens in theconsistency Active patience,
water the seed, nurture the seed, nurture the environment around
it.
Have faith, but keep workingtoward it and you know what you
(10:45):
will see growth.
But again, there are so manyfactors at play and how long it
takes.
Now, weirdly, the parallel is alittle bit more accurate in the
sense that most people will seesome kind of really big growth
in and around year five ofentrepreneurship.
But that's also not a given,just like having content out
(11:07):
there for 90 days solid is not agiven.
These are benchmarks, these aretime frames that we give in
general, but everything has itsown time, everything has its own
season.
And so if you have been outthere and you can honestly say
to yourself that you have beennurturing your seeds, that you
planted consistently, that youdidn't give up because you
(11:30):
didn't see something quicklyenough, that you didn't give up
because you got bored or youdidn't wanna have to wait, as
long as you're having to wait,if you can honestly say to
yourself I have nurtured it andI have cared for it and I
planted those seeds and Ibelieve that they're gonna grow
and I'm just gonna keep doingthe work that I know I need to
do.
Then you're good Active,patience, working as hard as you
(11:54):
can, within your allowedcapacity, toward your goal every
single day, while stillacknowledging it's gonna take
time and all you can control isyour output.
That's it.
That's all I've got.
But if that isn't one hell of alesson, I don't know what is.
As always, you can have successwithout the BS.
(12:15):
We're in this together.
I'll talk to you soon.
That's it for this week.
Thanks for listening to theBusiness Blast for Me podcast.
We'll be back next week with anew episode, but in the meantime
, help assist throughout bysubscribing and, if you're
feeling extra sassy, rating thispodcast, and don't forget to
share the podcast with others.
Head over toBusinessBlastforMepodcastcom to
(12:36):
connect with us and learn more.
Thanks for listening andremember you can have success
without the BS.
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