Quotes About Patience

Waiting for perfect is never as smart as making progress.

Leo Babauta's brilliant little book Zen Habits helps you think your way through this problem. His program is simple: Attempt to create only one significant work a year.

If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either. Part of leadership (a big part of it, actually) is the ability to stick with the dream for a long time. Long enough that the critics realize that you're going to get there one way or another…so they follow.

Life is actually far better than it is in the movies. And it takes longer.

When people quit, they are often focused on the short-term benefits. In other words, "If it hurts; stop!

Waiting isn't easy, which is precisely why it is so effective when engaging with other people.

Ben & Jerry's avoided temptation for years. If they didn't have a super-cool flavor or a great promotional idea, they did nothing. Yes to free ice cream once a year at every scoop shop, but no to 5 percent off any pint this week at your local store.

The best marketers are farmers, not hunters. Plant, tend, plow, fertilize, weed, repeat. Let someone else race around after shiny objects.

A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner. Before

You can't sprint every day, but it's probably a good idea to sprint regularly. It keeps the resistance at bay.

The first rule the music business failed to understand is that, at least at first, the new thing is rarely as good as the old thing was. If you need the alternative to be better than the status quo from the very start, you'll never begin. Soon enough, the new thing will be better than the old thing. But if you wait until then, it's going to be too late.

Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google, told me, "We knew that Google was going to get better every single day as we worked on it, and we knew that sooner or later, everyone was going to try it. So our feeling was that the later you tried it, the better it was for us because we'd make a better impression with better technology. So we were never in a big hurry to get you to use it today. Tomorrow would be better.

Dips don't last quite as long when you whittle at them.

The cog is standing by, waiting for instructions.

There's nothing that we can do to ensure that tomorrow turns out exactly as we hope it will.

Jay Levinson famously said, "Don't change your ads when you're tired of them. Don't change them when your employees are tired of them. Don't even change them when your friends are tired of them. Change them when your accountant is tired of them.

Never quit something with great long-term potential just because you can't deal with the stress of the moment." Now that's good advice.

Nine women can't have a baby in one month, no matter how closely they coordinate their work.

The next time you're tempted to vilify a particularly obnoxious customer or agency or search engine, realize that this failed interaction is the best thing that's happened to you all day long. Without it, you'd be easily replaceable. The dip is your very best friend.

Emotional labor is the work of doing what we don't feel like doing. It's about showing up with a smile when we're wincing inside, or resisting the urge to chew someone out because you know that engaging with him will make a bigger difference.

What wound did ever heal but by degrees?

I am like them-I want life. I want to go back to Manchuria, to find my house and my go table. I will return to the Square of a Thousand Winds and wait for my Stranger. I know he will come ... one afternoon ... as he did that first time.

The shelf number for the book would be inked in beside it, but each shelf contained about fifty books, so you had to hang there on the ladder and read every spine of every one until you came across yours. Let it be said that nothing was ever accomplished in haste at Iverson.

Don't be difficult." That was the wrong thing to say.