On Patience: What 14 Years in Uniform Taught Me

My dear Avyaansh,

The Navy runs on waiting. You wait for postings. You wait for promotions. You wait for the ship to dock. You wait for orders that may come tomorrow or may come in three months. You wait in heat that makes the deck shimmer. You wait in cold that numbs your fingers around a rifle. You wait and wait and wait, and if you are not careful, the waiting will hollow you out.

But if you are careful — if you learn to use the waiting instead of fighting it — something remarkable happens. The waiting becomes your teacher. The most patient men I served with were also the most dangerous men I served with. Not because patience made them soft. Because patience made them precise.

I learned patience the hard way. I am not a naturally patient man, Avyaansh. Your father is someone who wants results yesterday. When I started training calisthenics, I wanted the handstand in a month. It took eight months. I wanted the front lever in six months. It took two years. I wanted to build a platform in weeks. It took years.

Every single thing worth having in my life took longer than I wanted it to. Every. Single. Thing.

And here is what I want you to understand: that is not a flaw in the universe. That is the design. Things that come quickly leave quickly. Things that take years to build take years to break. The speed of acquisition determines the depth of the foundation.

Believe me, Avyaansh — destiny orchestrates a lot of things which might not make sense, but when you connect the dots looking backwards, you understand the grand vision of God. The waiting is not empty. It is full of invisible construction.

There was a posting I wanted badly. I was in my late twenties, hungry, confident, certain I deserved it. It went to someone else. I was furious. I spent weeks replaying it in my head, listing all the reasons it was unfair, building a case for why I had been wronged. The bitterness sat in my chest like a stone.

Three years later, I received a different posting — one I would never have been eligible for if I had gotten the first one. And that posting changed the trajectory of my entire career. It put me in a position to learn things I never would have learned otherwise. It introduced me to people who shaped the way I think about discipline, leadership, and purpose.

If I had gotten what I wanted when I wanted it, I would have missed what I needed.

This is the hardest lesson about patience, and I am still learning it. Patience is not sitting still and hoping. Patience is working with full intensity while accepting that the results are not in your hands. It is the ability to give everything you have to the process while releasing your grip on the timeline.

In your generation, everything will move faster. Information will be instant. Gratification will be immediate. You will be able to order anything and have it at your door in hours. And because of that speed, patience will become the rarest and most valuable quality a person can have. The world will be full of people who quit after three months because they did not see results. The world will reward the ones who stayed for three years.

I think about this when I look at my investments. The money I put away ten years ago has compounded quietly, patiently, without drama. No single month was impressive. But the decade? The decade was transformative. That is what patience does with money, with skills, with relationships, with everything that matters.

Your body teaches patience if you let it. I cannot tell you how many times I fell out of a handstand and wanted to put my fist through the wall. How many times I could not hold a front lever for more than two seconds and wondered if I was wasting my time. How many mornings I trained and saw zero improvement and heard the voice that says: give up, this is not working.

But the body is honest. It rewards consistency over time. Not over days. Not over weeks. Over months and years. And when the breakthrough finally comes — when you hold that handstand for thirty clean seconds, when the front lever clicks and your body is floating — the joy of it is proportional to the wait. Quick wins give quick satisfaction. Patient wins give something that changes who you are.

Patience is not passive. It is the most active form of trust. It is trusting that your work is accumulating even when you cannot see it. It is trusting that the dots will connect even when they look like chaos. It is trusting that God has a design even when the design makes no sense.

I am still learning this. I still get impatient. I still want things to move faster than they do. But I have fourteen years of evidence that the slow path leads somewhere real. And the fast path usually leads to a restart.

Be patient, Avyaansh. Not because it is easy. Because it is the closest thing to a superpower that an ordinary man can possess. The world will try to make you hurry. Let it. You stay on your own clock. Trust the process. Trust the years. Trust that when you connect the dots looking backwards, every single wait will make sense.

It always does.

— Your Dad

Har Har Mahadev 🔱