I Want It. I Just Don’t Want to Wait for It.

On delayed gratification, discomfort, and learning to stay with the process.

I’ve spent a lot of time doing the work of understanding myself.

I know what it looks like when I’m avoiding something because I’m afraid. I know the difference between resistance and genuine misalignment. I know that sometimes what looks like procrastination is actually overwhelm, and that sometimes what I’m calling a lack of motivation is really a desire for relief.

I’ve worked through a lot of these patterns before.

But I’ve noticed something about growth: the same patterns don’t necessarily disappear. Sometimes they come back at a different level.

Lately, I’ve been noticing one around my relationship with delayed gratification.

Because I genuinely want the life I’m building.

I can see it quite clearly: the business that works, the financial independence, the stronger body, the freedom, the creativity, the feeling that I’m actually using my time in a way that feels meaningful to me.

And most of the time, I know what needs to happen to create it.

With my body, consistency matters more than finding the perfect workout. With my business, there are things I need to actually do rather than endlessly think about. Building something takes time. Results aren’t always immediate. There will be stretches where the work feels repetitive, uncertain or even boring.

None of that is particularly mindblowing.

And yet there’s a difference between knowing what you want and being willing to experience everything that comes with getting there.

Because sometimes I don’t actually want a different goal.

I want a different experience of the process.

I want the reward now. I want to know that it’s working now. I want the uncertainty to go away now. I want the boring part to be over now.

And when I look underneath the behaviour, what I often find isn’t a lack of desire for the long-term outcome.

It’s a desire to feel differently in the present.

When discomfort becomes an instruction

Sometimes we interpret difficulty as information.

If you’re bored, do you jump to the conclusion that you’re on the wrong path?

If you’re frustrated, do you immediately change something or pivot directions?

If you’re not seeing results, do you start analyzing what you could be doing differently, focusing so heavily on strategy that you lose sight of the fact that some things simply take time?

You might even wonder, if this was really meant for me, surely it wouldn’t be this hard.

But sometimes discomfort doesn’t mean anything is wrong.

Sometimes it means you’re waiting.

Sometimes it means you’re doing something repetitive because repetition is just part of the process.

Sometimes it means you’ve put effort into something and you don’t yet have any satisfying evidence that it’s working.

And sometimes, quite honestly, it means you’re bored.

But knowing that intellectually isn’t the same as having the capacity to stay with it.

The temptation isn’t always to quit. Sometimes it’s much subtler.

You might look for something more interesting. Search for a different strategy. Change the plan and pivot. Spend time researching instead of taking action.

As humans, when we get uncomfortable or bored, we will often look for something that will make the process feel exciting again.

Instead of staying with the process itself.

The problem with being self-aware

I consider myself to be a pretty self-aware person. I can usually explain the pattern that’s playing out while I’m doing it.

I can identify the belief underneath a behaviour. I can understand where a pattern came from. I can have a genuinely useful realization about what I’m afraid of.

Awareness creates choice.

But there can come a point where more understanding isn’t what we need.

We need evidence.

Evidence that we can feel the urge to escape and not automatically follow it.

Evidence that we can experience uncertainty without immediately trying to resolve it.

Evidence that we can be bored without needing to manufacture stimulation.

Evidence that we can keep going without constantly needing reassurance that what we’re doing is working.

Because knowing that we have a pattern is one thing.

Having a different experience of that pattern is another.

Eventually, awareness has to become integration.

And integration has to show up somewhere in our actual lives.

I don’t want to become more disciplined at the expense of being alive

There is another part of this that matters to me just as much.

I genuinely like pleasure.

I like fun. I like novelty. I like having things to look forward to. I like making an ordinary Tuesday more interesting just because I can.

I don’t want to build a life where I’m constantly denying myself in the name of some future version of myself who will finally be allowed to enjoy it.

That’s not the life I’m trying to create.

I don’t want to become someone who can endure enormous amounts of boredom simply because she’s learned how to tolerate it.

I want a life that feels good now, too.

So I don’t think the answer is eliminating pleasure or becoming better at deprivation.

I’m more interested in the difference between pleasure and relief.

Sometimes something genuinely adds pleasure to our lives.

And sometimes we’re reaching for something because we want to change an internal state as quickly as possible.

We’re bored, so we want stimulation.

We’re frustrated, so we want distraction.

We’re uncertain, so we want an answer.

We’ve put effort into something and don’t know whether it’s going to work, so we want something that gives us a sense of reward now.

The behaviour might look the same from the outside.

But what’s driving it can be very different.

The stories we carry about ourselves

I’ve grappled with the belief that I don’t follow through.

Then the novelty wears off. The results aren’t coming quickly enough. Something else becomes more interesting.

And the story gets reinforced.

See? You don’t follow through.

You’re not disciplined.

You always do this.

I don’t want to replace that story with the opposite affirmation.

What interests me more is the idea that identity changes through evidence.

If we give ourselves enough experiences of following through, eventually the old story stops being the more accurate description of us.

Every time we don’t feel like doing something and do it anyway, that’s evidence.

Not dramatic evidence.

Just enough small experiences, repeated over time, to give us a different relationship with ourselves.

The space between wanting and having

Maybe this is what the messy middle actually asks of us.

Not to stop wanting the thing.

Not to make the process endlessly enjoyable.

But to become more capable of living in the space between wanting something and having it.

Because there is a gap between the life we can imagine and the life we’re actually living.

And sometimes we try to close that gap as quickly as possible through distraction, changing direction, seeking certainty, or looking for a faster way to get somewhere that simply takes time.

Maybe the gap isn’t always a problem to solve.

Maybe sometimes it’s an experience to learn how to have.

To want something without needing to have it immediately.

To be uncertain without needing an answer.

To be bored without assuming something has gone wrong.

To keep doing the work without needing constant evidence that it’s working.

That feels different from discipline.

It feels more like trust.

Not trust that everything will work out exactly as I want it to.

But trust that I can handle the space between here and there.