I recently read a book called "Four Thousand Weeks" written by a psychology columnist, Oliver Burkeman. This book can be seen as an anti-time management book. It advocates letting go of the obsession with time, accepting our limitations, and thereby creating more space for our lives.
There is a passage about patience in the book that I think is very applicable to entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship is actually a marathon. If you don't plan to stick with it for 10 years (or longer), then you probably shouldn't start.
Let things develop slowly, truly create value for the world, focus on important matters, and find satisfaction in the process rather than endlessly pursuing delayed gratification. If we don't enjoy the journey, it's likely that we won't achieve satisfactory results either.
Patience has three principles.：
Cultivate a taste for problems. We often mistakenly believe that solving the current management issue or product bug will lead us to a state where there are no problems at all. This kind of illusion is unrealistic in entrepreneurship. In fact, every problem is twofold: the problem we currently face and the frustration brought by our expectation that there should be no problems. Entrepreneurship is essentially about solving one problem after another; these problems are not obstacles but the inherent meaning of its existence. Entrepreneurship is like playing a game—when you solve all the problems, the game ends. The real fun lies in overcoming each level because the levels themselves are the core of the game.
Embrace radical gradualism. A psychologist named Robert found through an experiment that the most productive and successful scholars were those who wrote daily for short periods but consistently. They may not produce much each day, but their long-term accumulated achievements are significant. When we rush for quick results and work beyond reasonable speed, it may instead hinder our progress. Just as we cannot expect 10 pregnant women to give birth to a baby in two weeks. If a project can reduce manpower, have a smaller team size, but allow sufficient time and patience while continuously doing things with compounding effects, it is likely to be a better strategy. Of course, this is based on the premise that the market and track we choose are stable. Similar to Bayes' theorem, we should make small but consistent progress towards directions with higher success rates.
Creativity often emerges at the end of what seems uncreative. Anything we create doesn't truly belong to us; every idea and inspiration we have isn't entirely original. However, if we start by imitating others, then continuously accumulate knowledge, iterate, gain experience, try and correct, when we persist long enough, what we create will become unique. Any meaningful and distinctive achievement requires a great deal of time investment. All innovation builds upon continuous imitation, learning, and iteration. In entrepreneurship, innovation is not just about product features but also about updating production processes and technologies. Many such innovations may already exist elsewhere or in other times; we are simply re-enacting them in our own context.
Let "not being in a hurry" become our attitude towards entrepreneurship. This does not mean passive waiting, but during the process, we need to remain open, proactive, and sharp in our business acumen while not allowing fatigue, irritability, or emotions to interfere with our decision-making.