You can't fast-forward a pregnancy

I've got the patience of a goldfish.

I'm ADHD and ambitious as hell. I want every result… yesterday. And that combination of traits has taught me the same expensive lesson more times than I'd like to admit:

In our quest to get results, we get so impatient that we try to force them prematurely — and that impatience is exactly what sabotages our ability to get them.

Let me say that a different way. You're so focused on getting the result fast that you rush. You skip steps that had to happen. And the skipping is what guarantees you never get the thing you wanted.

I've lived this in turnarounds.

I'd walk in certain the result was a quarter or two away, only to realize I had to let some people go, recruit and replace them, and build new systems & processes I assumed were already in place.

The whole time, it felt like nothing was happening.

Plenty was happening. I just wasn't measuring it.

Every result you're chasing has conditions that have to be true before it can show up.

You can't turn a nine-month pregnancy into a three-month pregnancy, no matter how good at being pregnant you are. Certain conditions simply have to be true for that baby to arrive healthy. No amount of intensity or urgency changes that.

Same with the revenue number you want, the team you want, the sales engine you want. Wanting it faster doesn't create the conditions.

Building them does.

And building the conditions follows the same sequence every time: you solve one problem, and solving it creates the next one.

Take an example from our world.

When a business owner decides they want outbound appointments, the first problem is usually that nobody's making calls.

Hire a rep — now they need training.

Train them — the first calls are rough.

Fix the calls — appointments get set, but nobody shows up.

Fix the no-shows — some of the people showing up aren't qualified.

Fix the data. Now they're qualified but not converting — go fix discovery.

And on it goes, variable by variable, until the whole thing runs.

Which is why, when I see a client with a lousy show rate, I consider it good news. You can't have a no-show problem without appointments on the calendar. That problem only exists because several problems before it are already solved.

You simply need to solve that problem to unveil the next.

And this isn't an outbound thing. The same chain shows up when you launch a new offer, restructure a team, enter a new market, or take over a turnaround. Every level you reach hands you the next problem to solve. That's not the process failing.

That is the process.

Which brings me to the reframe I want you to steal: progress toward the result is the result.

You may not have the end number yet. But the system got built. The wrong candidate got screened out before they cost you six months. The broken step got exposed — which is the only way it was ever getting fixed.

Hell, sometimes firing somebody who isn't working out is the progress that gets you the result.

None of that shows up in the number you told yourself to expect.

All of it had to happen for that number to ever exist.

I'm not telling you to raise your tolerance for not getting results. And I'm not saying speed doesn't matter — it does. There are absolutely places you can compress the cycle, and you should.

What I'm telling you is to get clear on what you're measuring. Because if the only number you'll accept is the final output, and you ignore everything that has to be true for that output to exist, you'll quit right before it works.

I've watched owners pull the plug on something at the exact moment the hardest problems were finally behind them. From the inside, it felt like failure. From where I sat, they were a couple of variables away from the result they'd been chasing the whole time.

The patient, consistent, long-game players win — way more than the ones who pivot constantly and react to everything. Not because they're wired with more patience than you or me. Because they know what progress looks like on the way to the result.

And when they see it, they keep going.

Adios,

Ray