When patience doesn’t serve you as a solopreneur

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For solopreneurs, patience isn’t always a virtue. I’m not a fan of the Silicon Valley truisms about speed, like “move fast and break things.” They’re overused and one-size-fits-all.

Despite the ick of this glamorized hustle culture sentiment, speed really is necessary when you’re self-employed. Specifically, urgency in your decision-making and actions can help you adjust your offerings to shifting market demand, win clients, and free up brain space.

Patience doesn’t serve you when you’re waiting your turn, overly perfecting your approach, or following the rules without question. These are moments when too much patience makes you complacent and limits the momentum of your work. Been there, done that!!

I’m not suggesting dropping it entirely and becoming an impulsive jerk, just better identify the choices and actions where it’s beneficial to move forward with less hesitation. I’m actively working on this myself, so take my advice and realize I’m finding the balance too.

Patience is valuable situationally as it helps us stay resilient when facing repeated rejection and when things out of our control are unfolding. One study by professors Sarah Schnitker and Robert Emmons found that patient people are likely better equipped to handle stress as they experience less depression and more self-control. We need a healthy dose of it to get through tough challenges, weather busy seasons, and navigate complicated relationships.

Most of all, patience is necessary as the sole decision maker when defining the strategic considerations for your business, as it takes time and research to do proper due diligence.

I define “strategy” as the choices you’ll make for your solo practice that are likely to have a significant impact on the trajectory of your business or when they directly affect your customers.

For example, deciding which type of legal entity is the best way to structure your solo practice or troubleshooting with a client to pinpoint the real source of a thorny problem. Both of these strategic choices involve patiently assessing the options, not hastily.

It’s the decision and actions around tactical and operational tasks where patience is less important than urgency. As long as you’re making ethical choices and there aren’t serious repercussions if this goes wrong. Here’s why you should dial back your patience:

1. A little less patience and opting for speed can be a competitive advantage of a one-person shop, as you’re not bogged down by group decision-making or bureaucracy. You can move forward on a project, address a market gap, and execute on an idea in a tighter timeframe than a team can. Making you an even more appealing partner-for-hire.

2. Urgency over patience is beneficial for finding the answer with iterative experimentation, or rather, a series of tiny experiments on a rolling basis to more quickly gather insight. You need to research the options and collect data for many of your daily decisions, so get in the habit of making scrappy, small-scale experiments that help you get closer to an answer more rapidly. This can look like running A/B tests weekly or surveying customers over email for regular, real-time feedback.

3. Getting real-world reactions to your ideas is a higher priority than perfecting them. The ideas you’re sharing with customers, partners, the media, and the public need to have merit, but must get in front of the right people during their first rounds of consideration.

These rounds are the short, nuanced windows of an opportunity for an idea to have legs in its earliest stages. Say you’re pitching an editor on a story idea, it needs to be the right fit and the right time for them to accept it. If you wait too long to send it their way, even the best idea will get a pass.

You don’t need to be the first to share your idea. You do have to be early enough that it’s relevant to an industry shift, the client’s need, or an emerging problem. Being earlier doesn’t guarantee a positive reception, but can offer you tangible feedback to learn and apply later.

Whether you’re moving with urgency or taking a more measured, patient approach, neither is a catch-all to be applied to every scenario without considering the complexities.

Many, if not most, decisions and tasks you’re working on as a solopreneur are considered tactical and operational, and those should usually be promptly acted on. That’s tactical items like drafting presentations, updating your CRM, and invoicing clients, to operational moves like prospecting clients, monitoring trends, and continuously upskilling.

The strategic choices with complexity, like setting your goals, expanding your business model, and decision-making on behalf of customers, are the actions that deserve more patience.

Putting this into practice requires you to be honest with yourself about why you’re being patient in a given moment, or why a certain task demands that you move quickly.

I’ve caught myself a few times diligently going through each step of a workflow and at first thinking: “I’m taking the right approach and practicing patience with the process.”

When really, going through the motions was my own way of procrastinating by being busy, but not actually working on something of impact that mattered more in the business.

It happens, so course correct when you find yourself going patiently or impatiently down a path for the wrong reasons.

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