Impatience: The Pitfall of Every Ambitious Person

I&#x27;m a big fan of both Robert Greene&#x27;s <i>Mastery</i> and Leonardo da Vinci, but I think using da Vinci as an example of patience is fairly misleading. After having read numerous biographies on the man, my conclusion is that it&#x27;s remarkable that he managed to get as much done as he did. He was the ultimate dabbler, interested in and curious about virtually everything. His works took a long time to complete because he generally was distracted by some minor detail for years on end. If the ideal is productivity, then surely Michelangelo is a far better role model.<p>Of course, the <i>real</i> question here is whether productivity is what one should be ultimately aiming at. Doing <i>very few things very well</i> (alternatively, <i>creating a small number of high-quality things</i>) is a better ideal, to my mind.<p><i>&#x27;It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.&#x27;</i> - Friedrich Nietzsche

Anecdote from my own running training: when I get impatient, I get injured.<p>There is this idea that if you can just get this hard workout done even though you&#x27;re not fully recovered, you will get closer to your goal. You hear the siren song to be patient, skip the workout or make it an easy day, but choose to push hard anyway. And so instead of missing one good training day, you have to spend 4 weeks or more off of running.<p>And so everyday I have to remind myself to be patient, be consistent, and be honest with myself.

On the one hand - I agree you have to be patient in order to execute at the right times. On the other hand, that&#x27;s only in terms of timing...<p>You can&#x27;t be patient and wait for opportunities. You have to be consistently searching for them, and execute as you find them - staying as nimble as possible.<p>For instance, I am always 100% invested, but always in various types of assets. Some investments I can get my money out in 24 hours, others take weeks or months to divest. That enables me to execute quickly when I see opportunity, but only in a limited fashion.<p>I don&#x27;t believe it&#x27;s &quot;impatience&quot; that keeps me invested at that level. It&#x27;s the fact that, being idol does nothing.<p>Hell, I&#x27;m even platform around identifying new opportunities. I didn&#x27;t &#x2F; don&#x27;t want to be patient, so now I&#x27;m building something to enable faster decisions:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projectpiglet.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projectpiglet.com</a><p>Kind of reminds me of a similar parable from the story Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein, in it there was a man &quot;too lazy to fail&quot;[1]. The idea is summed up by a quote:<p>&gt; Progress isn&#x27;t made by early risers. It&#x27;s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.<p>Ambition is just trying to accomplish things. In my opinion, it&#x27;s impatience that pushes us to solve problems, else we&#x27;d all settle for the way things are. The trick, is learning to solve them in a way that mitigates risk. Which is really what the author is trying to get at. Arrogance (or over confidence) might be a better description of the pitfall, than impatience.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Time_Enough_for_Love#&quot;The_Tale_of_the_Man_Who_Was_Too_Lazy_to_Fail&quot;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Time_Enough_for_Love#&quot;The_Tale...</a>

It&#x27;s funny that he would take the famously lazy and impatient Leonardo as a role model here.<p>Unless he thinks <i>The Last Supper</i> is supposed to be like that.

&quot;If your work is not hard, you’re not doing great work.&quot; - that sums up German mentality :D

&gt; Look at it this way. You’ve spent enough time getting where you are — don’t screw it up by wanting to go too fast. Spend more time on your work. Take pride in it. That’s the only way we can do truly great work.<p>My favorite quote.

Why is the story about investing in 2009-2011 in this post?<p>Unless they invested right in 2011, and your benchmark for &quot;impatience&quot; is investing in late 2007, their accidental market timing probably lost them money.<p>Plopping everything they made into some popular ETF when they made it probably would&#x27;ve been better.<p>The only actionable advice I saw in here was journaling. Pure platitudes otherwise, and as talon pointed out the examples aren&#x27;t great.

Impatience, greed and fear can be confusing bedfellows when investing.

Lol. Anyone on an hourly rate should use this line to their fee-payer.<p>Rough heuristic is that in most projects, delay + downside-uncertainty = go-nowhere failure&#x2F;death. You need to chip away at one or the other with your loop of actions to get anything done. Otherwise it is just luck.

Ambition is the enemy of consistency.<p>Be consistent.

As someone young, and highly ambitious, I&#x27;ve taken to seeking like-minded peers by asking people where they&#x27;d like to be in 10 years.<p>It has the air of being a quite typical interview-y type question, though I think it&#x27;s useful to see, given youthful optimism and the astounding future promise of our field (software + computing), just how many shy away from declaring great personal hope and aspiration, seeing no place for themselves in the future&#x27;s next great achievements or assuming they will &#x27;just happen&#x27; around them.<p>It&#x27;s a shot in the arm to actually hear someone young candidly express grand aspirations whilst soberly embracing the year and years of toil those aspirations demand. It galvanises me, and no matter how much work I&#x27;ve taken on recently, makes me feel far less tired.