Patience is bitter — Kelford Labs Daily

“Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.”

— Aristotle

The single most important skill a marketer needs to develop is patience.

Because all good marketing takes time.

Yes, you can temporarily juice the numbers with some extreme gimmick or investment, but spikes are inevitably, inexorably, followed by troughs.

So if you want your marketing to be sustainable, to grow continually and consistently for the long-term, you can’t afford a temporary spike.

Which means you need patience. And patience is the hardest thing.

It’s hard because it feels like everyone else’s marketing success seems to be happening now, but yours is happening in the future, and you want to get there faster.

But it’s almost certain that their current marketing performance is the effect of practice, of patience. It just feels like it’s happening now because that’s when you’re noticing it.

Just as your future marketing success will appear sudden to others when it happens.

But the weird, troubling thing about patience is that, as Ayelet Fishbach writes in Get It Done, “we become more eager to complete the goal, and therefore more impatient, the closer we get to its end state.”

The more progress we make, the less patient we become.

So the closer you get to your goal, the more eager you’ll be to get there and the harder it will be to take your time.

Which makes patience a bitter thing indeed.

But across my career in marketing, and across the countless industries I’ve worked in, the most common cause of marketing failure is impatience. It’s rushing. It’s blowing budgets on gimmicks and short-term spikes.

It’s forgetting that our instincts fail us when it comes to long-term thinking. Instead, we require structure, pace, and discipline.

So that we get what we want, and when we get it, we can keep it.

Because we took the time to get it right.

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