In entrepreneurship, impatience is a virtue
Impatience turns wantrepreneurs into hackers, designers and programmers that focus on execution instead of just ideas
It is often said that patience is a virtue. And sometimes it is.
The best time for patience is when you don’t have control. If you’re waiting in line at the DMV to renew your license or stuck in rush-hour traffic on the 101, no amount of impatience is going to change things for the better. In these cases, impatience is counterproductive because the stress-induced cortisol shooting through your veins will inevitably grind you down and make it harder to fight the battles that actually matter. It’s better to keep your powder dry.
In the world of entrepreneurship and startups, these same rules don’t apply. When you’re building a startup, there are a lot of things you don’t have control over: timing, the market, your competitors, the macro-economy. These forces are so powerful that they can overwhelm great products and great teams like a giant wave that capsizes a tiny boat. Building a company (at the risk of mixing too many metaphors) is like a game of three-dimensional chess that never really ends - and you’re constantly dancing on the edge of glory and failure. The only thing you have control over is yourself, and in this persistant battle to create something from nothing, impatience is your friend.
Typically you will hear people talk about “drive” as an essential ingredient to building great products and great companies. But in an entrepreneurial context, drive is really just the ability to convert impatience into action. The first time I was ever exposed to “code” was about ten years ago when I was editing my MySpace profile with one of those glittery HTML generators. I became so impatient with how shitty my profile looked that I started manipulating the code directly to get the result I wanted and Googling things like “How to make an image tag” so I could write simple things like <a href=”image.jpg”>link</a>. A few years later I started my first little company, a T-shirt business that made politically-oriented (read: libertiaright wing) t-shirts and bumper stickers. I had poll-tested my first batch of t-shirt sketches with my fellow high-schoolers and when it came time to actually make the designs I didn’t want to hire a designer because I was too impatient, so I played around in Photoshop for hours until I felt happy enough to take the files to the printer.
The difference between an entrepreneur and a wantrepreneur is that entrepreneurs use impatience as a vehicle for making progress; it’s the fuel in the tank that keeps the trip going. The roadblocks and hurdles that stop nontrepreneurs in their tracks just become the next milestone in the journey for the weathered entrepreneur. Need to build a proto-type but aren’t very good at programming? Wireframes and photoshop are your friend and can get potential users closer to a real product than a sixty-page business plan ever will. Don’t have a “technical cofounder”? That sucks. There are so many free resources out there to start learning to code (like Stanford’s video lectures on Objective-C and Xcode) that the barriers to entry are practically non-existent.
For wantrepreneurs, impatience is usually greeted with a range of excuses that masquerade as progress (business plans, schwag, going to conferences) all of which obfuscate and abstract from the core task had hand - learning how to build a great product. When you are pouring your energy into things that are on the periphery of what actually matters, progress becomes nothing more than an illusion. This observation comes from experience because I’ve been on the wantrepreneur side of the ledger many times before. Instead of digging deep and learning to program, I’ve procrastinated and tried to fill the void with building pitch decks in Powerpoint that just fall flat. It was just a little over a year ago I finally took the plunge and started learning to build iOS apps in Xcode because I wanted to get closer to the metal of the products I was building - and I still have so much to learn. The internal struggle between being a wantrepreneur and entrepreneur isn’t a battle that ends, it’s a battle that I fight on an almost daily basis.
Impatience is a virtue because when it can be converted into action. The biproduct of this type of action, of knocking down obstacles over and over again, creates a specific kind of momentum that is incredibly important for building companies. It’s not the false kind of confidence rooted in ideas and words but the kind of confidence you can only acquire through execution, anchored by the humility of having tried and failed over and over and over again. Even though I’ve designed and launched a handful of products, I still don’t consider myself a designer or an expert in user experience. Even though I’ve been programming here and there on the web and for iOS for several years, I am the furthest thing from a software engineer. Even though I’ve shipped products that have acquired thousands and thousands of users (Gunman got over 1M users), I’m no growth hacker either. I’m just an impatient son-of-a-bitch that learned how to design, program and growth hack products out of necessity, in the pursuit of trying to build something people want. If I do my job right, I’ll be able to find real designers and hackers to join the cause - but they better be impatient too.
