Everything moves fast now.

Same-day delivery. Instant answers. A news cycle that's already onto the next thing before the first one has finished. We've built an entire civilisation around the elimination of waiting, and somewhere along the way we forgot that some things can't be rushed. Not because the technology isn't there. Because the thing itself requires time.

Epictetus put it plainly: No great thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

He wasn't making a point about agriculture. He was making a point about us.

I am not a naturally patient person.

I want things to move. I check on things I just checked on. I feel the pull to push when something isn't progressing fast enough — in the business, in a conversation, in a morning that has seventeen things to get through before 8am. The instinct to hurry is always there, sitting just below the surface, waiting for something to be slower than I'd like.

And I still snap. At the kids, at situations, at myself. Less than I used to. But it happens.

I'm not telling you this from the other side of some breakthrough. I haven't solved it. There's no version of this where I sit down one day and achieve patience like it's a certification. That's not how it works. I know that now, which is itself a kind of progress.

What actually changed things, slowly, without me noticing, was the kids, was life.

Not a single moment. Just years of small negotiations that don't go your way and can't go your way because you're dealing with a person who is six years old and has a completely different relationship with time than you do.

A child who needs twenty minutes to decide what she wants for breakfast, then changes her mind. A missing shoe that holds up the entire operation and cannot be reasoned with. A bedtime that begins at 6:30 and ends, somehow, at 8:15, with three glasses of water and a detailed question about whether fish sleep in between.

You can fight the clock or you can adjust yours. Fighting it never once worked.

So you adjust. Slowly. Imperfectly. With a fair amount of failure along the way. But you adjust.

The Stoics didn't talk about patience as a feeling you eventually arrive at. They talked about it as a practice — something you return to, not something you achieve. Epictetus understood that the fig doesn't blossom and ripen because it's trying hard. It just does what it does, in the time it requires. Our impatience doesn't change the timeline. It just makes the waiting worse.

There's a chapter on this in Don't Be a Dick, a book I've been working on for a while. The short version is the same as the long version: the problem was never the waiting. It was the story we told ourselves about what the waiting meant.

Here's what I've actually learned, over ten years in.

You don't become patient.

Nobody becomes patient. What happens, if you're paying attention and you care enough to keep working on it, is that you become slightly less impatient. Gradually. Over a long time. With regular setbacks.

The progress isn't the absence of the snap. It's the gap between the snap and the recognition getting smaller. You catch it sooner. You pull yourself up faster. You say the thing you shouldn't have said and you notice it within seconds rather than hours, which at least means you can do something about it.

Some days you don't catch it at all. Those days are a reminder that this isn't finished. It's probably never finished.

That's not a failure. That's just what it looks like to actually be working on something.

The world isn't going to slow down.

If anything it speeds up. The pressure to have the answer, close the deal, finish the conversation, resolve the thing — that's not going away. The instinct to rush is always going to be there.

So the question isn't whether you're a patient person. Nobody is, really. The question is whether you're a little less impatient than you were last year. And then again the year after that.

The fig doesn't care about your timeline.

It just ripens when it ripens.

Until next time,

Broden Johnson