I have the patience of a toddler. The kind who has a meltdown because her sippy cup isn’t refilled up fast enough.

I don’t drink out of sippy cups anymore, although I did until I was about 6 because my 2-year-old brother used them and I wasn’t about to be excluded from sippy cup fun. Not much has changed since then. Which basically means I have the stubbornness of a 6-year-old as well.

Impatience and stubbornness. Awesome combo (yes, Internet, I’m being sarcastic). Especially when it comes to growing a business. I want our business to be a smashing success. And I want it to happen now. The problem comes when things don’t happen as quickly as I want them to and I find myself teetering on the brink of an all-out tantrum, all because I’m too stubborn to admit that not everything happens the way I want it to all the time…certainly not for lack of trying, though…

That’s when I need to remember to be like Pooh. Don’t laugh. I’m being serious. Well, on second thought…laugh all you want. Laughing is good 🙂

Pooh is effortlessly calm, still, and reflective. Pooh doesn’t force or interfere with things, but lets them work in their own way and in their own time, to produce results naturally.

However,  that doesn’t mean you sit idly around waiting for success to fall into your lap. That’s when I remind myself of this quote: “Success is what happens when opportunity meets preparation.”

So instead of being impatient and stubborn (or maybe in spite of would be a better way of putting it), I’m going to put my effort into preparing our business for the kind of growth we’re hoping and praying for.

“If you’re in tune with The Way Things Work, then they work the way they need to, no matter what you may think about it at the time. Later on, you can look back and say, ‘Oh, now I understand. That had to happen so that those could happen, and those had to happen in order for this to happen…’ Then you realize that even if you’d tried to make it all turn out perfectly, you couldn’t have done better, and if you’d really tried, you would have made a mess of the whole thing.” – The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff