The Impatience Paradox: how to develop more patience for getting results when progress is almost invisible

Have you ever felt that nagging impatience when working toward an important goal? That almost physical itch wondering why success isn't happening faster?  

You're not alone. 

The truth is that transformative change rarely feels significant in the moment. While we expect to see daily improvement, real progress accumulates invisibly, only revealing itself after consistent effort over extended periods.  

What do you do while waiting for progress to show up? How do you stay consistent? How do you know it's working?... 

When we examine the journeys of those we admire—whether entrepreneurs, authors, or leaders—their success appears almost magical. What we don't see are the countless hours of imperceptible progress, the years of showing up when results weren't evident. Their "overnight" success typically represents decades of incremental improvement that went unnoticed by the world and sometimes even by themselves.  

The answer?  
Setting up better systems for tracking "the invisible" progress.  

And that's not all!  

Often, when pursuing goals that take decades, we decide to "entertain" ourselves with many other goals, just in case" this one doesn't work out.  

Often, stealing that success we desire so much. 

The episode also tackles another critical obstacle to achievement: our tendency to spread ourselves too thin. Much like trying to prepare a feast with only enough ingredients for one good meal, we dilute our impact when we distribute our finite resources—attention, energy, and time—across too many objectives. Research confirms that focusing on just one habit change dramatically increases success probability, while attempting multiple changes simultaneously often leads to complete failure. This explains why many people remain perpetually busy yet never achieve their most meaningful goals.  

Ready to transform your approach to growth?  

Listen now to discover practical strategies for tracking progress, maintaining motivation through invisible growth phases, and focusing your resources where they'll create the most significant impact.  

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00

Hey guys and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. This is a podcast for people passionate about change, about evolving, growing, becoming our best selves. We're learning here how to change faster, more effectively and, most importantly, more intentionally, gradually and sometimes in leaps, becoming the person we want to see in our future. Change Guys, I don't know about you, but with all the things with the eye and just in general, the world seemingly to be going at faster speeds, I feel this impatience in me more than ever before. When I'm working on something, I'm asking myself I feel this almost itch or urge like why is it not happening, this result, this breakthrough, this business breakthrough, this personal, this future that I see myself so vividly in? Why isn't that happening already? Why am I not there, sometimes feeling like a failure, sometimes feeling like everything is moving forward except me. And I remind myself of this story, my personal experience. I can do full splits. I can sit on the floor like a gymnast with my legs spread into two different directions, and I've been able to do that for the past 20 years, literally 20 years.

Speaker 1 1:41

When I was 17, I decided I wanted to do a split. I want to be in a split position when you are 17,. You just have those desires. I don't know, maybe actually it's ongoing throughout our lives. Sometimes we're just like I want to reach this goal, be my fittest or my richest or my most awesome self in relationships. Whatever that is, I just want to nail that. So that was one of those things and I decided okay, I'm going to do stretching every day to reach that goal.

Speaker 1 2:18

And I remember going to the gym. There were a lot of things happening. I was studying computer science, I was involved in different sports pursuit. Besides doing splits, there was student life, all this, I don't know rollercoaster and just a buffet of experiences. And I didn't really think, as I remember, much about split at all. I just committed to doing the practice every single day and on any day, between two days, even a week, a couple of weeks. You wouldn't really see a lot of progress. You wouldn't see, oh, day one, this or day two, a lot of progress, day three, more progress. No, on any given day. Moving from day to day, it actually felt like I wasn't making much progress, like it felt the same, like I felt exactly as the same person. But in a year I was able to do split and I never lost it, ever since I have the proof in myself Every day, whatever time of the day, I'm able to do a split and it reminds me of how life and progress on more complex, more long-term goals is and on any single, on any day consistency and showing up and making incremental progress.

Speaker 1 3:49

It doesn't feel, it doesn't look like anything to you or to anyone around you, but at some point when we do things consistently and we focus on progress and we push a little bit more forward and we just when we take on the challenges that life brings into our life and we learn and we apply and we get feedback and we try to do better with our honest effort, magic happens. We end up getting results that a lot of people think are impossible Even we didn't think it was possible, somewhere in our hearts. When we look at our heroes, our favorite authors, our favorite entrepreneurs, our favorite leaders in any arena, their progress, their success very often feels indistinguishable from magic. You know there is this saying any advanced technology feels indistinguishable from magic. You know there is this saying any advanced technology feels indistinguishable from magic. That actually is true for human development, when you see someone far ahead of you or having developed a skill, to such a mastery. It feels like magic often and it feels like no, they just were born this way, they somehow lived there and just became this person.

Speaker 1 5:14

But very often we just don't see a couple of decades of work, of this incremental change that's been happening, that was not noticeable to us or to them, and then all of a sudden, they arrived to this success, this mystery, and the whole world noticed them and they're like, oh wow, that is such an amazing individual, they are so talented and they probably just arrived there, to that thinking, to this result, to this outcome and success in the real world. But actually it probably, from my experience talking to many successful people, it's happened inch by inch, step by step. When, on any given day, they didn't see progress, they probably felt just as impatient. Hopefully, over the course of their lives they developed this understanding as I'm developing right now that you know the progress is done inch by inch. So, yes, be impatient and try to push the envelope a little bit more forward every single day, because nobody is guaranteed decades and decades of life. So so, start living the life in pursuit of what matters to you right now, but also understand that the vision that you have that decade ahead over your vision. It's going to take a decade and the progress on any given day can feel like, well, like nothing, like an ordinary day, nothing special, with some wins here and there, indication that you are making some progress or moving forward. But most of the days you show up, you do the thing, nobody notices, you don't notice, but you're still moving forward.

Speaker 1 7:05

I guess the practical takeaway here just like I do for my clients, I establish we create the systems to track progress in many different ways, so we do have a way to give, to get feedback, to adjust our learnings, to make the progress more effective, to speedify somewhat the journey, because the more feedback you get, the faster you can adjust between what's not working, what's working, the more you can iterate and try new things and grow and improve. The faster you can do that, the faster you will progress towards your goal. So the first takeaway inch by inch, it's not going to feel like anything special on any day and so your best tool here to keep going is to create a system to track progress in many different ways and to adjust as fast as possible so you can make your journey towards your goal more effective. We now have AI, which we can ask, which we can share with a lot of information so openly, and we can get feedback and we can just much better system of figuring out what's working, not working and what we need to do next, even if we don't have prior experience of getting certain result. So that is number one, inch by inch and on any given day. Folks, it's not going to feel like any progress at all.

Speaker 1 8:34

But then the second takeaway from today's podcast is a little story again. Imagine in your fridge you have certain ingredients, certain fruit, veg, fish, meat, eggs, whatever that is and you decide to cook a meal and there are only that many meals. Maybe you only have enough ingredients to create one good meal and you have to choose. Which meal is it going to be? Is it going to be I don't know fish with veggies done in a French way, like I'm just a very simple cook, so I don't have a lot of recipes in my head or is it going to be pasta with seafood? What is it going to be? I don't know. And then you have to choose and those ingredients are finite and you can't make any other meal after you've done with that. Let's just assume you have ingredients for only one or a couple of meals and you have to make choices how to prioritize your resources, at least for the time being.

Speaker 1 9:43

In life, we often forget that our energy, that our attention, that our ability to learn, that our motivation, our willpower, our ability to go through challenging experiences, our time. It's limited. We don't have abundance of it. Time is one thing. You're never going to get back any of that. You can make more money and increase that. You cannot make more time. When it's past, it's past, you lost it. Whatever you decided to spend it on, you spent it.

Speaker 1 10:17

But then also, every single day, you wake up and you have this energy and you have motivation and you have the ability to think, to make decisions, to be creative, to again go through challenging experiences, to solve problems. And that is finite every day as well. That's why they recommend, first thing in the morning, work on the most important task, the task that you want to move forward, to move your life forward, to move your business forward, to move your relationships, your health forward. Because, as the day progresses, you have less and less and less of that energy, of these resources, of this willpower, and so you spend it on going through social media, getting in some arguments, some drama, just shuffling things around, going through your to-do list that, at the end of the day, means nothing and you move none of your important goals life, a career, personal forward. Guess what? You do it day by day, by day, and in a year, in a decade, you end up to nowhere, to not moving anything that you thought was important to you forward. You just been busy and I work with all kinds of people. I have friends, I have family and I work with all kinds of people. I have friends, I have family, even my parents. My mom is retired. She's busy every day without having a job, without having any business, just doing this, you know, helping me and helping my sister and helping my dad, etc. These are all important, but my point is you always will occupy your time and you can be super busy every single day and not really achieving the most important things to you. So your resources are finite. That is the takeaway.

Speaker 1 11:58

I had a session with a client of mine like a week ago and he shared with me. I like when my clients are really open. He's like Angela. You know, I feel overwhelmed. There are like too many things to track. I feel like I'm not succeeding already just by starting this week, and for me it was a cue. Yeah, you overloaded your client. Maybe they are going through this period when whatever you told them to do, it feels overwhelming. For me it was the cue to choose one thing to help them prioritize, to focus, that will help them to move towards their goals in a non-overwhelming way. And we did that with a specific client.

Speaker 1 12:40

Right now we are focusing on nutrition and adjusting body composition and, in general, adjusting, improving eating habits. And he said you know, I feel like I'm eating too much bread and obviously it's not like for variety, not that great for calories, for nutrition anyhow. So we decided to focus on eating one piece of bread per meal. That's it, that's the focus of the week One piece of bread per meal and that was it. And you know what I know from my practice that at the end of this week we're going to arrive to success 99.9% of the time when we focus on just one thing, and that is backed by research, by the way.

Speaker 1 13:22

The more, for example, habits people take on, the less likely any of the habit will happen. And when people focus on just one thing, success is almost a guarantee, and that goes back to patience. Sometimes we feel we need to do all of it or we are not moving, progressing, we are already behind. But the irony of that is, when we are taking on all of it, we end up doing nothing. Well, when we are taking on all of it, we end up doing nothing well, failing with being consistent and just not seeing any progress.

Speaker 1 13:54

It's kind of like if you're trying to grow a bicep and you do all of these different exercises, all of them, and you're like why my bicep is not growing, well, maybe because you're trying to do all of it and your bicep gets any real work at all. The more of energy, of resource, of thinking, of effort you put into something, the more it grows. Now, if you distribute that and again, your resources are limited If you distribute that to many different goals, to many different habits, to many different objectives, to many different goals, to many different habits, to many different objectives, each of the objectives, each of the habit, each of the actions, each of the piece of work will receive a lot less and therefore they will grow a lot less. And so think about that Every time you're saying too many yeses and you're choosing to distribute your time, attention, your energy, your money, your efforts between many different things, the most important things. You're stealing from the most important things and that's how you might end up never reaching any of the important objectives you have.

Speaker 1 14:59

So maybe this is a wake-up call I don't know, but it's a reminder to myself for sure to focus on a few things, prioritize, understand yourself better to know what those most important things are and then, inch by inch, invest work, effort, time into building this thing, and you'll be surprised how much success success in the world, success in your personal life, success just for yourself you'll get Once you just get into work on a fewer things, inch by inch, putting in reps day after day, when it's not going to feel like a lot of progress at all, it might feel like nothing on most days, but when you do that consistently for even a year, leave alone two, three, four or five a decade, you'll be surprised how much success that, for the rest of the world will feel indistinguishable from magic you're gonna get. So to sum it up to two takeaways. Number one progress towards big goals. On any day will feel like nothing, like you're not moving at all, and that's okay. Just figure out many ways that you can still track progress, however small, to keep yourself going. And number two to learn effectively to spot what's not working, to adjust faster and to find what's working and double down on that.

Speaker 1 16:31

And number two if you spread your efforts, your resources among too many things, you spread yourself too thin. It's like baking a cake or making a meal. You're not going to have sufficient ingredients for making a good enough meal if you spread all of your ingredients all over the place. So choose your main course. Dedicate majority of your time, energy and effort toward that, make it consistent and you'll be surprised how many amazing things will start happening. So note to self, note to you If you found this podcast useful, guys, please do share this with at least one other person who might equally need to hear that, who might be frustrated with lack of progress, who might be impatient and maybe spreading themselves too thin. So share this podcast episode. It will mean a world to me. Let's improve each other's life one step at a time, one conversation, one podcast at a time. So please do share, rate, review. It means a world to me. And till next time, keep changing, keep growing and, yeah, become a better self, no matter how small the progress is.