Patience and the Long Plateau
Scope: Stulberg’s treatment of patience as a competitive advantage in The Way of Excellence: why progress is slow and nonlinear, how to live on a plateau, and why volume of work produces quality. Short-run consistency rules are in Consistency Over Intensity.
Patience is active
Stulberg quotes Bruce Lee: “patience is not passive, it is concentrated strength.” His own claim: “There is no such thing as an overnight breakthrough. Patience is one of the greatest competitive advantages there is. It neutralizes our inclination to hurry and overemphasize acute results, and it lends itself to strength, stability, and lasting progress. I’ve yet to meet someone who has achieved excellence and who describes their process as being rushed.” The reason is structural: “to make a meaningful difference in just about anything of consequence, the work you put in needs to persist long enough to break through inevitable barriers and plateaus. What seems like a static period may not be a static period at all; you may just not yet be seeing the effects of your efforts.”
The plateau as the main terrain
Aikido master George Leonard, quoted: “you have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills … But while doing so—and this is the inexorable fact of the journey—you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere.” Stulberg’s translation: “Excellence is a long and windy road that is full of ups, downs, and everything in between, including periods of boredom.” Against pop culture (“progress should be fast, predictable, and easy”): “The truth is that progress is often slow, nonlinear, and more challenging than you think.” His compressed recipe: “Pick your thing. Pick a good system for your thing. Surround yourself with people who support you doing your thing. Do your thing for a decade (or more).” Age changes the shape: “your contributions and insights may shift toward wisdom and mentorship.”
Mechanics of patience
- Break goals into parts: quoting Lao-tzu (“accomplishes the great task by a series of small acts”), “Breaking goals down into their component parts and then focusing on those parts is essential to patience.” See Process Over Outcomes.
- Tolerate waiting: “if we can stay with the discomfort of waiting, if we can just hold on and avoid making reckless decisions and big mistakes, then we improve our odds of accomplishing something extraordinary. … All you can control is your effort right now.”
- Show up for the low-odds attempts: the chess example: a young player “may only win that match against Carlsen one out of one hundred times, which is why it’s so important to show up for the other ninety-nine.”
- Quantity builds quality: “the more we produce, the better we become.” Two causes: luck (“if we keep showing up and producing, we improve the odds that eventually everything comes together”) and learning (“the more reps we put in, the more we experiment and figure out what works and what doesn’t”).
- Process loves you back: coach Matt Campbell’s line: “If you fall in love with the process, then eventually the process loves you back … You don’t know when it is going to love you back. All you have to do is be prepared for your opportunity.”
Nine innings
“Most things that are worthwhile take time. As they say in baseball: Be patient, it’s a nine-inning game.” The reframe: we convince ourselves “the current inning is the only one there is and ever will be.” Zooming out relaxes the perceived immediacy. “Excellence is not about being a champion of one inning. It’s about playing all nine as best we can.” This is the temporal counterpart of Holiday’s claim that Marcus “was good for so long that he became great,” from Justice as a Lived Virtue.
Patience is the cognitive side of compounding
Compounding explains why long efforts pay; Stulberg adds that the experience of compounding is a plateau, because the early returns are invisible. Patience, then, is the skill of acting on the model (compounding) while the data (visible progress) still disagree.
Tension with fit before grit
Stulberg’s advice to stay for a decade conflicts with his own advice to sample widely and quit freely before fit (Excellence as Mastery and Mattering). He resolves it by sequence: patience applies after fit is found; before that, quitting is the correct strategy.