Patience

This last weekend I went to Sugar Mountain, North Carolina to celebrate my dad’s 50th birthday and go snowboarding. Any weekend on the mountain is a good weekend, but this trip in particular taught me a lot of valuable lessons on patience.

The trip began with me bringing all my snowboarding stuff out with me from the Bay. Filling my one carry-on bag with my pants, jackets, gloves, and helmet. However, I opted not to bring my snowboard, I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of bringing a snowboard across the country. Big mistake...

This is where things start to get fun. The first day we got in, my dad and I decided to go for a short night skiing run. Night skiing starts at 6pm, it’s 4:30 so we are great on time. The lodge has a rental place so I’ll just rent a board there, not a problem. We get down to the main lodge and the line looked a bit long, but nothing insane.

30 minutes later and slightly frustrated we get to the front of the line and pay for the rental. The out-of-date software and slightly confusing procedure caused a lot of confusion. Whatever, 30 minutes, not too bad. It’s 5:15 we still have 45 minutes until night skiing opens.

Now it is time to get fitted for the board. This is where it starts to get reallllyyyy fun.

As we walk into the board fitting room, the line is about 100 people deep and is wrapped around the building. With one poor soul working the counter.

As we sit their waiting we realize the predicament that we are in. In the first 30 minutes of waiting in the rental line we move about 10 places up. We are going to be stuck here for a while.

2 hours later we get to the front of the board rental line. Poor guy has been there since noon as a few of his co-workers just didn't show up today.

Board in hand. We make it out. It’s 7:15, but it is better late than never.

We get our equipment on, get on the lift and we are off to the races.

Not so fast.

About half way up our journey to the top the lift comes to halt.

Oh great, another stop.

We sit for 15 minutes getting whipped around by the cold North Carolina winds while we dangle about 50 feet above the mountain. Not the ideal spot to be stuck, but it could be worse.

Finally, the lift starts back up. Another 10 minutes and at 8pm we are finally hitting our first run.

Patience is a virtue and North Carolina has taught me a few lessons on it.

The beauty of the whole ordeal about being stuck in the rental line with my dad is that I was able to spend more than 2 hours with my dad talking to him and recounting all of the fun memories we’ve made over the years Snowboarding (and creating new memories like being stuck in a rental line for 2 hours). It made it a good experience in of-itself.

When you are in a situation where you are largely out of control you really have two choices. You can decide to have a good time or you can decide to have a bad time.

The best part about this, as I am sitting in Charolette’s Airport on my way back to the bay and typing up this blog post, my flight just got delayed 2 hours.

When this happened, I was faced with a choice. Do I go and complain to someone who has no control over the delay or do I utilize this time for something more productive, like writing this blog post.

Think about it, next time you are stuck in traffic. No matter how mad you are, no matter how anxious you are, no matter how much you want to get home so you can read my blog post, nothing will change the fact that you are stuck in traffic. You can either sit in you car and complain about how bad your life is, or you can use that time to do something productive; throw on a podcast, plan a date, call your parents or a friend. Sitting there sulking will not change the fact that you are stuck in traffic, it’s just going to ruin your drive.

Launching a company feels a lot like driving on the freeway, there are times you are going to be going 100mph in the carpool lane and there are also going to be times you will be going 2mph in bumper-to-bumper traffic. By becoming more patient you can use those 2mph times to focus on setting you up for success so when you get to a wide open freeway you can floor it (speeding is dangerous, this is just a metaphor).

Plus, it makes the ride a whole lot more enjoyable.

Happy Sunday.