Leaders know how to wait for things. They wait for people to buy-in before they launch wholesale change initiatives. They wait for external financial circumstances to line up with company needs before making major purchases. They wait for tasks to get done and people to show up, and sometimes, they even wait for the weather to change (at least, I do living in Colorado!) Any time something important needs to get done, there are usually a list of things which have to fall in place before the leader has the ability to make things happen. Leaders know how to wait. Note, I didn’t say they like it. Typically, waiting is the last thing a leader wants to do, but because they have gone through the process enough times, they have come to understand that moving on an idea before enough of the key components are in place, confronting an issue before you have all the facts, or frankly, just taking the first shortcut one sees, can spell disaster, often jeopardizing the entire operation, or at least adding a tremendous amount of time to the effort.
As I was growing up, I remember hearing from the adults around me, “There goes a man in a hurry.” That was an accurate description of who I was and how I functioned. I knew what I wanted and I wanted it immediately, causing myself many situations where I ended up somewhere on the road to my goals, but never fully equipped to get to my final destination. I ended up settling for almost as good as I wanted things to be because I had been impatient and taken too many shortcuts. Many of my choices actually prohibited me from truly arriving at the destination I so deeply desired. To this day, I still feel that the “man-in-a-hurry” behaviors of my youth have caused me to have to make up for lost time decades later. It’s no fun. I understand that I can’t allow the mistakes of my youth to dictate how I function as a grown-up, but I still live with the regret, and I often wonder what it might have been like had I been more disciplined and not always in a hurry. Had I been more thoughtful about my actions and taken things at a slower tempo, I’m sure I would’ve avoided some pretty major missteps and start-overs. Today would be different, most certainly.
Dr. Henry Cloud calls this the principle of the ant. In his book, 9 Things You Simply Must Do, he states, “Taking the long road, one tiny step at a time, will actually get you there faster because you will not lose time by trying shortcuts. People who want it now face frequent discouragement because of their many false starts.” That certainly describes me as a youth and a young man. Fortunately, I believe I’ve learned quite a bit of the lesson, however, I still am often impatient as I am envisioning where I want to be in comparison to where I am. I have to use the discipline I’ve developed to ignore shortcuts and force myself to do the hard work of the ant, carefully adding one small grain of sand to my anthill at a time. I have many things I still want to see happen in my life, and frankly, I want them to happen sooner rather than later, but that doesn’t seem to be the way I’m going to get to my desired destination. I am fortunate that God doesn’t allow me to be as foolish as I was years ago, or perhaps, He’s helped me learn the lessons well enough that I no longer function in that way.
I still don’t like to wait. I still always strive to make things better and different and be on the road to the vision I have for my life. But now, when an opportunity to cut a corner presents itself, I’m far less likely to take it. I just don’t have time for shortcuts anymore. Neither do you and neither do leaders.
Lead well.