The Value of Patience
Another week has passed, and it has been intense! I am continuing to work at less than 100% capacity, choosing to savour the last few days of summer with my family. Choosing to curtail my available time forces me to work more intensely when I’m “on”. It’s been difficult to do so, and I started wondering why. I had assumed that I only had the three major projects that I’m working on, but it turns out I’m working on no fewer than nine projects right now! Some of these, admittedly, are in their very early phases (really in the process of converting leads to clients), but they take up time nonetheless. So it’s no wonder I feel busy!
One of the most important things that I have learned recently is the value of patience. I used to think that patience meant waiting, politely, for others to “catch up” or deliver. I now realize that patience means something quite different: for me it means not having to accomplish everything right now. Instead, it is completely acceptable to not finish something right now as long as progress is being made toward the end goal. It’s important to keep your eye on the prize, but it’s equally important to enjoy the journey to that prize.
So this week, I enjoyed spinning up multiple linux machines to experiment with distributed computing, working on grant proposals with new colleagues, taking time for a wonderful meeting at a local café with people I’d only met online (aside: it’s pretty funny when all parties are googling for pictures of each other while we are in the same café after realizing none of us really knew what each other looked like), forking bitbucket repos, converting Knowledge Forum tuplestores to MongoDB, experimenting with Sakai’s Entity Broker, and talking about Participatory Design with a very talented doctoral student in Industrial Engineering. Progress on each of these fronts means getting closer to many of my goals.
The high points of my week, however, centred around my work with the non-profit Firehorse Leadership Organization. Last weekend I got the opportunity to represent Firehorse at a local event (a pet festival called Woofa Roo), which was a lot of fun for everyone. 
And as usual I indulged myself with attending the Pony Show that the Junior Leaders put on for their finale each week. But I think the best news this week was learning that a grant proposal that I helped craft has made it to the next round of funding interviews with a major granting agency. I am particularly proud of this accomplishment because I am using my powers for Good. All those years of writing (academic) grant proposals seem to have paid off!
Now, if I could only find time to work through the Entrepreneur’s Toolkit… maybe next week! It seems that working on business development is for entrepreneurs very similar to what writing is for academics. That is, it’s the important but not urgent task that gets put off again and again!