Time and the Discipline of Patience
A shift from urgency to endurance — and what it takes to stay.
My relationship with time has always been complex. It’s one of the most difficult internal shifts I’ve had to make, and continue to make. I used to think it was about speed. Urgency. Momentum. But over time, I’ve realized it was something deeper: a constant battle between expectation and process, control and surrender.
For most of my professional life, I’ve moved quickly. I’ve built companies, launched brands, experimented with ideas. Some of those ideas were ahead of their time. In the early 2000s, I launched an online gallery years before the art world began moving online. Around that same time, I created a company called Meme Group, designed to help companies promote products by spreading ideas through chat rooms and early social media. It was a form of influencer marketing before influencers existed. Later, I started Satao Group, where the cornerstone of the brand was original content, on YouTube, Instagram, and beyond. We applied the model for clients, but never fully realized our own content vision.
Looking back, it’s clear to me: those ideas weren’t wrong. They weren’t flawed. They were just early or maybe even on time. But more importantly, they were abandoned too soon. I didn’t stay long enough. I didn’t let them ripen.
At the time, I thought the problem was capital, or maybe execution. But now I see it more clearly. The deeper issue was time, or more precisely, my intolerance of it. I wanted results fast. I wanted confirmation now. I didn’t know how to wait, and I certainly didn’t know how to endure uncertainty. I moved from one idea to the next, not because the previous one had failed, but because I couldn’t sit still long enough to let anything grow.
Underneath that urgency was something else: a need for control. I didn’t want outside investors. I didn’t want to compromise. I wanted the wins to be mine but also on my timeline. And when things didn’t unfold quickly, I internalized it as failure.
Today, I see things differently. I’ve come to understand that speed is not always the solution. Sometimes, the answer is stillness. And stillness doesn’t mean doing nothing, it means knowing when to pause. It means understanding that momentum is not always visible. That silence is not absence. That waiting and patience can be a form of work.
The work I’m doing now is different. Not in its ambition, but in its posture. I’ve committed to the long arc. I’ve given this project years, not months. And even when the doubts creep in (because they do), I remind myself that this time, I’m not walking away. I’m letting it unfold.
This change hasn’t been easy. I was trained; my nervous system was trained for urgency. I was addicted to motion and maybe I still am at times, but I know better now. Productivity was my baseline. Rest felt like risk. Even now, I sometimes feel the pull—the need to do more, to move faster, to prove I’m progressing. But I’ve learned to pause and observe it. I don’t let it lead.
Rewiring your relationship with time is not about slowing down. It’s about building trust. Trust in your work, in your vision, and in yourself. It’s about understanding that creation is not a sprint, it’s a discipline. And the more you build from clarity, the more resilient your work becomes.
That’s what I mean by the discipline of patience. It’s not passive. It’s not lazy. It’s intentional. It’s a decision to engage with time differently. To stop measuring your value by your velocity. To stop judging your ideas by how quickly they catch fire. To understand that the best work often looks like nothing… until it becomes something.
What is changing for me isn’t just mindset. It is physiology. I am still teaching my body that stillness is safe. That rest is not abandonment. That not posting, launching, or scaling for a few days, or weeks, does not mean I am disappearing. It means I am anchoring.
In the process I had to stop looking for proof in metrics. And start finding presence in the pause.
I had to let go of urgency not just as a strategy, but as an identity.
Urgency is often dressed up as ambition, but it’s usually fear. A fear of being left behind. A fear of irrelevance. A fear that if you’re not constantly visible, you’ll disappear.
But clarity doesn’t come from speed. And neither does truth. They come from listening. From waiting. From choosing to stay present when the world tells you to move.
It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And the most necessary.
Because if your system is wired for performance, urgency feels like oxygen. And patience feels like drowning.
But what if it’s the other way around?
What if presence is the breath?
And motion, the endless motion, is what’s weighing on you?
In many ways, this work begins here, in the pause. In the moment between ideas, between launches, between seasons. It begins when you choose to stay present even when there’s nothing to show for it. It’s in those moments that your internal foundation is built—the one that allows you to lead, to build, and to endure without collapsing into urgency.
And maybe you don’t feel this battle every day. Maybe you already have a gentler relationship with time. Or maybe you’ve just found your own way of carrying this discipline, quietly, without naming it. That’s okay too. This isn’t a confession for the restless. It’s an invitation to notice what’s already steady in you, and to let it lead.
And if you’re in that space right now—between the vision and the result, between the work and the reward, I want to offer this:
You’re not behind.
You’re not slow.
You’re not late.
You’re building in real time.
And that takes time.
Give it what it needs.
Not what the world expects.
Because the work you’re doing, the work that matters, won’t arrive on a schedule.
It will arrive when it’s ready.
And so will you.