My previous blog post focused on the reasons why an entrepreneur is likely to need patience. This post introduces three entrepreneurs who aren’t naturally patient by temperament but who intentionally learned patience as a business and life skill. I will also suggest a three step process to learn patience.

Andrew Cagnetta, CEO of Transworld Business Brokers, recalls, “Patience came tough to me as a New Jersey Italian American young entrepreneur. I thought I would be financially independent at 25. Now that I am 45 and not financially independent by my definition (although successful by others), I have learned that real business success is a marathon, not a sprint. Change in degrees requires patience. You have to let repetition and education ferment/mellow like a good wine.”

In 2008, Greg Stallkamp launched Holos Fitness, a social networking Web site focused on a physically active lifestyle. Before starting his new company, Mr. Stallkamp worked in the fast-paced world of finance and investment banking. In his finance career, patience was not required. But in his new venture, Mr. Stallkamp learned that there were often times when technical staff could not be rushed to finish projects if they were going to do their jobs well. Mr. Stallkamp found himself impatiently waiting for results and becoming upset about his perception that his company was growing more slowly than he would like.

Out of necessity, Mr. Stallkamp taught himself to multitask rather than hound his employees to hurry up. While Holos Fitness employees are working to meet deadlines, Mr. Stallkamp focuses on leadership and strategic design. He says, “It is a small compromise and one that still requires a great deal of patience. However, it has helped me adjust to an entirely new way of doing business.”

Tina Paparone, co-founder of children’s gift company, BeMe, says that before she became an entrepreneur in 2009, she equated patience with being lazy or boring. After she co-launched BeMe, Ms. Paparone tried to use pushy and overbearing business tactics that worked well for her in the past, but she quickly realized that these strategies were not working well at BeMe. Ms. Paparone forced herself to slow down and practice patience, commenting, “I still believe that if you build it, they will come, but it might take awhile… by accepting I cannot control everything, I have actually re-established control of my own environment.”

Are you motivated to learn patience? If so, here is how to do it:

1.  Accept the necessity of patience in work and other spheres of life. Until you make it a conscious goal to be patient, you are less likely to achieve it.

2.   Find a mindfulness/stress management strategy that works well for you. Experiment with exercise, meditation, yoga, journaling, etc. Doing this helps you to have a longer fuse, making it much easier to feel patient during challenging circumstances.

3.   Be patient about learning to be patient. You probably won’t go from chronic impatience to blissful patience overnight. Instead, your journey will likely be one of ups and downs, successes and failures. As long as the overall trend is toward increasing patience over time, consider it a victory!

Echoing one of Ms. Paparone’s favorite quotes:

“He that can have patience can have what he will.”
Benjamin Franklin

“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.