The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned. —Fred Brooks
Patience and self-discipline are close cousins. If you want to reject instant gratification for the sake of accomplishing your long-term goals, it might take months or years before you receive your big compensation. Without patience, you’ll get nowhere.
While sometimes you can force results to come more quickly — by pushing yourself harder and being as diligent as you can during the process— oftentimes things take time and there’s no way to rush them, no matter how many resources you apply.
Like pregnancy, some things follow a natural schedule you can’t control. If you fail to identify which things cannot be rushed, you might misapply the power of self-discipline and instead of achieving them more quickly, fail to achieve them at all.
For example, a body has a natural limit of how much body fat it can burn during a week without breaking down your muscle. If you try to rush the process by starving yourself, the most likely end result is an unplanned cheat week that will not only take you back to square one, but most likely add some additional body fat to your frame .
Even with things that are difficult to measure, such as learning to control your mind so that you can eventually radiate optimism, you can’t force yourself to change overnight. Rewiring your brain takes time, and it doesn’t matter how much time you spend meditating or reading books about
emotional control; a process that is so profound takes time.
Generally speaking, if it has taken you years or decades to develop a negative trait, don’t expect that you can reverse it within weeks or months. Approach such undertakings with the belief that you’ll do your best, but that you won’t get discouraged or frustrated if the process is slow. It would be a futile as a woman complaining that pregnancy lasts nine months.
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