Letter 11B – F*ing Patience**

Before we can begin the climb, we need to talk about something that hits close to home for me and for almost every quietly burdened midlife millionaire I know.

Patience.
Or more accurately, f***ing patience.

You have to have it. More of it. No way around it.

The Quiet Burden cannot be fixed overnight. Trying to go faster is not only unhelpful, it is often harmful. I wish it were different, but it’s not.

This journey we are on is one of compounding.

It is a word and an action I have always loved because I have always loved compounding money. Since junior high, when I first grasped how 2 becomes 4, 4 becomes 8, 8 becomes 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, and so on, I was hooked. Einstein called it the eighth wonder of the world.

But what most people forget is that the most important input in compounding is time.

Time. That maddening, precious, unforgiving thing. We wish it away when we are impatient, then beg for it back when it slips through our hands. It is awful. I hate it. But time is what makes compounding work.

Patience and time are inseparable. You need both to do this right.

When I train with my brother, every time we move into a new phase of speed work, I start us on a slight uphill. Not to make it harder, but to slow us down. If we start too fast, we drain ourselves early or worse, get hurt.

You can’t rush interval training. You can’t rush transformation either.

You can’t undo twenty or thirty years of success-building, reward-chasing, and habit-layering overnight. The frameworks that made you successful do not vanish just because you have decided to want something new.

Even when you know patience is the answer, you will fight it. You will speed up, break something, get frustrated, slow down again, and then repeat the cycle. I have done it. Everyone I know who is trying to evolve has done it.

So you have to give yourself permission to be patient and let time do what compounding does best.

But that doesn’t mean waiting to start. Compounding only works if you begin.

Don’t be patient and then start. Start, and then be patient.

Pack your bag. It will feel heavy at first. That’s okay. You will shed weight as you climb.

The steeper the ascent, the more you will understand what can be left behind. Fatigue will make you honest about what you truly need to carry.

On my first long-distance hike at nineteen in Alaska, a friend brought seven decks of playing cards in his pack. Seven. We still laugh about it. He carried them for miles before realizing how ridiculous it was. The more we hike, the less we carry, both literally and figuratively.

The same thing will happen to you.

So get started. Be patient. Let time compound.

The journey isn’t about speed. It’s about elevation.

One step, then another. That’s how the climb begins.

Next week, patience makes way for progress, not perfection.