Is this you and your business?

This is a story about our hero’s constant war between ‘patience vs instant gratification’ and the battleground is his heart and mind.

Patience is a skill. It lives in your mind. It makes sense. Patience helps you learn what to do and it bears superior results. But patience must have the worst PR person working for it because everything it builds is invisible. For all your effort and the resources you apply, often you have nothing to actually show for it. Even the language around patience changes – ‘costs’ become ‘investments’. Somehow that’s supposed to make you feel better about the spends.

On the other hand, instant gratification is an emotion and occupies your heart. It has allies like temptation, envy and ego at its loyal disposal. These conspire to seduce you into sabotaging superior results in favour of satisfying the immediate pang. In contrast with patience, instant gratification needs no PR. Everything it builds is clearly visible for everyone to see.

A well-known children’s fable illustrates the battle between patience and instant gratification beautifully. As children, we have all heard a version of this classic story. Let us tell you the fable in eight bullet points the way busy people prefer to consume information:

1. Three little pigs are told by their mother that they must leave home to make their own way in life.
2. The first little pig builds himself a house made of straw.
3. The second little pig builds himself a house made of sticks.
4. The first and second little pigs finish building their houses by the first night. They laugh and tease the third little pig for building a house of brick which took so much more time and effort.
5. The wolf smells the first little pig in his house made of straw. ‘Little pig, little pig, let me come in.’ The pig squeals, ‘No, no, not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!’. Wolf threatens, ‘Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in!’ … and he does. Luckily, the first little pig escapes just in time to his brother’s house made of sticks.
6. The wolf follows the trail and finds the first and second pigs inside the house made of sticks. ‘Let me in’, huff and puff and the pigs are off again, running away from their ruined house.
7. The wolf follows and finds all three pigs inside the house made of brick. ‘Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in.’ Pigs replied, ‘No, no, not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!’. Frustrated, the wolf cried: ‘Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in!’ … but he couldn’t.
8. The cunning wolf works out that he can slide down the brick chimney and snare all three little pigs. As smart as the wolf is, the third little pig is smarter. He lights the fire and the wolf shoots back up the chimney never to return.

Like you, the hero of our story is an entrepreneur, founder and business leader. His story mirrors your journey to build the business equivalent of the brick house and at this very moment in time, you are either:

• not there yet, or
• right in the middle of it, or
• telling some great war-stories about how you successfully negotiated it.

On the surface, this simple fable suggests that the smartest people build businesses made of brick. But the more insightful question is: ‘why build a business made of brick instead of straw or stick?’

The answer lies in scale and size.