On Patience: ‘Today isn’t my day, but my day is coming’

Anything worth pursuing in life, will take time and effort to actually achieve it.

You look at who you are and what you want, and if you’re willing to do what it takes, to put in the work and say ‘no’ to the things that distract and redirect you from working on your dreams, you’ll eventually get there.

As Rocky says “It’s about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done.”

And this is where most people fail. They start with great will, a great devotion and hope in their eyes and hearts, but then stuff takes longer than they expected. They’ve been doing it for a couple of months of a couple of years, and start feeling entitled to having it and when they don’t, they stop doing the work because “what’s the point?”.

The lack of patience is one of the biggest destroyers of dreams and goals, and at its root is an unwillingness to see where you are. To be self-aware enough to know how much you still need to work, how much experience you still need to gain in order to achieve it. As Eric Thomas says, “you should be happy you didn’t get your dreams yet, because you’re so immature that if you got it now, you’d probably lose it”.

So the key to keep moving forward, Rafael, is to ensure your path is what you want and walk it, every day giving further steps in the direction of your goals and dreams, and on those days where you’re feeling down and beaten up, or even that you failed an important milestone or someone else got a promotion or a praise that you were working to, you get your chin up and tell yourself “Today isn’t my day, but my day is coming”, and you get back to doing the work, because that’s the attitude that will ensure you’ll actually get there. It's all part of training.

Most overnight success stories are really decades in the making, and just because you lost doesn’t mean you’re a loser, so practice patience and reset your expectations on not only milestones but skills that you need to evidence to be who you want to be and knowing that few people end up exactly where they thought they’d end up, but when they’re working and patient they always become better and always achieve further.