We are living in the microwave age. We all want what we want when we want it… which is right now!
Why wait when you can have it today? Uber Eats to your door, finance approved online within 10 minutes, credit card companies mailing you with an immediate credit increase if you just sign a form. What about all the buy-now-pay-later options out there in retail? You can stock your home full of beautiful furniture – and pay for it in a few years time.
Yes, everything we want and need can be delivered to us in an instant. So when it comes to career and business success, the same must apply, right? I mean, what about all those Instagram influencers who are making really good money – and many of them aren’t even over 20 years of age. They’re getting overnight results, so shouldn’t we?
I have a nephew whose girlfriend has over 140,000 Instagram followers. She’s a bikini model so it’s probably best that I don’t send you a link to her page… Her success has been overnight, which naturally makes others want the same thing.
But in business and in your career, generally speaking, life just doesn’t work like that. Sure, there are a few individuals who happen to get venture capital and go from start up to massive success in just a few months, but often, if the success is not forthcoming, the venture capitalists remove further funding and the business is over.
Or you grow too quickly and you then have neither the money or skills yet to fund the growth, which is another reason a lot of businesses collapse.
As Warren Buffett famously quoted on people’s and companies finances, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”
In our organization, it has taken us 16 years to get where we are. These have been very long, hard years, but all that time it has taken, I can now see how fortunate we are that it didn’t happen overnight. The lessons learned in building brick by brick and step by step mean that in a shaky economy, we have our foundations so deep now that it will be a lot harder to rock us than in the past.
The Global Financial Crisis is a true example that all things work together for good. The success we were achieving was actually too fast, and so we came down hard when the economy virtually stopped. Turning the organization around was the hardest thing I have ever done while cleaning up the past, but God had a better way and a better business model for us and it took the GFC for me to seek Him to find it.
This is why the Bible teaches us to chose wisdom over gold (Proverbs 16:16). For if you choose wisdom first, which is building deep foundations and therefore taking the slower path, you end up getting to the gold anyway. God really does know what He is talking about!
So as we get ready to start a new week, you might wake up Monday feeling you’re a long way from where you need to be, but that is okay. If you can just take one step at a time, one day at a time, whilst ensuring that you are heading in the right direction, you’ll look back in a few years time and be amazed at just how far you have come.
Remember, life is a marathon, not a sprint, so let’s put away the microwave and bring back the slow cooker! The end result is the same, but only better.
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Matt Danswan is the CEO of Initiate Media, publishers of Christian Woman. He also blogs at www.mattdanswan.com. His new book NOT Business As Usual documents the story of the building of Initiate Media debt-free.
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