“Patience and fortitude conquer all things.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some people think that entrepreneurs launch their own businesses because founders of companies are too impatient to tolerate slow-moving bureaucracies or the tortoise-like process of climbing the corporate ladder, rung by rung. Both of these things may be true, but does this mean that entrepreneurs need not worry about cultivating patience because impatience is a virtue in fast-paced start-up environments? I say, “Absolutely not,” and there is ample evidence to back me up.

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft told Fast Company magazine that products and businesses all go through three phases:  Vision, patience, and final execution. He observed that people enjoy the vision and final execution phases, but that most people are very uncomfortable with the patience phase.

Perhaps because of urban legend surrounding overnight successes, entrepreneurs hope to go from zero to 60 mph as quickly as possible. But in reality, “overnight success” takes years, 7-10 to be exact. Paul Buchheit, creator and lead developer of Gmail, blogged about the 7.5 years it took Gmail to evolve from a product that many people thought was a doomed dud to a product with a 40% growth rate from 2008 to 2009.

“Guitar Hero,” the video game that was the first in history to reach $1 billion in North American sales, was 10 years in the making by developers Harmonix and RedOctane. Serial artistic entrepreneur Lisa Canning described the 10 years as, “A decade of learning that ingenuity comes in two flavors: the kind where you invent mind-blowing technology (that was the easy part for two guys with master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and the kind where you build a legitimate business around it.”

A co-founder of stackoverflow.com, Jeff Atwood, wrote:

I have zero expectation or even desire for overnight success. What I am planning is several years of grinding through constant, steady improvement. This business plan isn’t much different from my career development plan:  success takes years. And when I say years, I really mean it! Not as some cliched regurgitation of “work smarter, not harder.” I’m talking actual calendar years. You know, of the 12 months, 365 days variety. You will literally have to spend multiple years of your life grinding away at this stuff, waking up every day and doing it over and over, practicing and gathering feedback each day to continually get better. It might be unpleasant at times and even downright un-fun occasionally, but it’s necessary.

There are studies indicating 10 years is a meaningful unit of time. Malcolm Gladwell presented evidence in his best-selling book, Outliers, that the key to success in any field (including business, science, sports, and music) has less to do with talent than is commonly believed. Instead, success comes from practice, 10,000 hours of it — 20 hours a week for 10 years. Mr. Gladwell called this the “10,000 hour rule.”

Are you convinced that patience is necessary but you are feeling daunted by the requirement? My next blog post will explore strategies for cultivating patience in a “hurry up” world.