Great Things Take Time
The best things in life take time, yet the more you want something, the less patience you have.
Aristotle captured this truth perfectly when he said, “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.”
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Think of learning to play an instrument — the first months are filled with wrong notes and frustrating practice sessions, but years later, the ability to create beautiful music makes that difficult journey worthwhile.
Chances are you’ve witnessed this in your own life. Both professionally and personally.
Perhaps you’ve spent years driving toward a goal you thought would take much less time, or you had a vision for your family that hasn’t worked out as you imagined.
A writer might spend a decade mastering their craft. An entrepreneur might spend years in fruitless iterations before finding his original vision. These journeys rarely follow our desired timeline, and this is incredibly frustrating.
Big dreams take years longer than you anticipated. Your heart’s desire leads you down a longer path than you expected. You find yourself feeling behind at this stage of your journey.
But none of this is a reason to stop pursuing things that are important to us.
If anything, it’s a chance to create clarity in your life.
The critical question becomes: Is this goal truly worth the extended journey it demands?
Breaking Free from Time Pressure
Author Sahil Bloom offers a profound insight in his “New Opportunity Test” that changes how we evaluate our commitments. Instead of focusing on immediate rewards or quick wins, he suggests asking yourself: “If this takes twice as long and is half as rewarding as you expect — would you still want to do it?”
This question transforms how we think about our pursuits. It strips away the optimistic timelines we often create and forces us to confront the true value of our goals.
Accepting that achieving your goals of becoming a writer, building your dream business, or learning to play the guitar will take twice as long and be less rewarding isn’t negative.
By asking this deeper question, we do two things at once: determine if something is truly worth pursuing and remove the artificial pressure of time from our decision-making process.
When we remove time pressure from our goals, we create space for a more fundamental question: how do we achieve these longer-term aspirations?
The answer lies not in grand gestures or periodic bursts of motivation, but in small, consistent actions we take every day. This is where habits become crucial.
Breaking free from the pressure of time isn’t enough. We must pair this mindset shift with concrete action.
Building Sustainable Habits
While we can’t control time, we can control our daily habits, which are the true architects of our future.
We get in trouble when we look for hacks and shortcuts.
Take fitness, for example. The 30-day challenge promising six-pack abs might give you quick results, but the consistent habit of three balanced meals and regular exercise transforms your health long-term.
In business, “growth hacks” might drive short-term metrics, but the steady habit of customer retention, strong marketing, and product improvement builds lasting success.
Even in creative pursuits, the “write a novel in a weekend” approach doesn’t live up to the daily habit of writing 500 words, rain or shine.
The sustainable approach might look like this:
- Instead of crash diets: Building the habit of cooking one healthy meal per day
- Instead of all-night study sessions: Dedicating 30 minutes each morning to learning
- Instead of aggressive networking sprints: Make one meaningful professional connection each week
When we chase quick results through unsustainable methods, we’re left facing an inevitable truth: temporary solutions yield temporary results.
A crash diet might help you lose weight rapidly, but without sustainable habits, you’ll soon be back where you started — or worse.
So try removing the clock from your biggest goals, create the space to cultivate an effective and sustainable daily life, and build great habits.
Without this in place, we have no chance. We will burn out and quit.
The Power of Persistence: Why You Only Fail If You Quit
The Chinese bamboo tree is nature’s most remarkable growth story, and it contains an invaluable lesson that everyone should remember on their journey.
For five years the bamboo tree shows virtually no visible growth, despite being nurtured and watered to ensure the soil around it is properly cared for. During this period, the plant invests all its energy in developing an extensive root system.
In the fifth year, given proper care and nutrients, the bamboo explodes to its final height of 80–90 feet within six weeks.
Writing for a small audience might not make you a successful writer today, but it’s building a foundation — just like the bamboo tree — for something larger in the future.
Your daily trips to the gym and healthy food choices won’t reduce your waist size overnight, but what happens after a year? As long as you don’t quit.
Your journey might not have the same explosion as the bamboo tree, but you’ll never find out if you don’t stay in the game.
Keep nurturing, keep caring, keep growing.
Otherwise, you risk flaming out and never reaching your goal.
Hard Journey Might Be Worth It
Almost every goal I’ve ever set took longer than expected. Painfully so.
There were moments when I wanted to quit. Forget I ever tried. Start over. Do something different and move on with my life.
In these moments I like to think about the courageous men and women who’ve come before us.
Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.”
Maybe it’s a test. Maybe you haven’t paid your dues. Maybe you aren’t ready. I don’t know.
But when I’m ready to throw the towel in on a big goal, I think about all the times I didn’t quit and how I was deeply rewarded beyond what I could imagine. It hurt then, it wasn’t easy, but I kept going.
As Roosevelt continued, “I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”
The journey might be longer than we want it to be.
But that doesn’t mean the outcome can’t still be great.
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