The longest hour and a half

A roll that would not develop

Today my daughter cried in my arms for an hour and a half. Maybe more. I stopped counting, because counting was not helping.

I tried everything I knew, which is to say almost nothing but improvisation.

• I changed her position.
• I offered food.
• I rocked,
• I walked,
• I whispered,
• I stayed silent.
• I vacuumed the floor.
• I put vacuum and hair-dryer songs.

I checked everything a manual would tell you to check. Nothing worked. She just cried, and I just stood there breathing, a grown man who runs companies and negotiates deals, completely powerless in front of almost six kilos of pure protest (this might be her french DNA).

That's deeply humbling that some problems do not want to be solved. They only want to be waited out.

If you had asked me a year ago whether I could handle a situation like that, I would have said no way. Not a chance. A month ago, I was still fighting it, still looking for the trick, the cheat code, the position that would finally make it stop.

Today, somewhere in that endless hour and a half, something shifted. I stopped trying to win. I just stayed.

Patience is not a personality trait

Since I was a kid, people told me about patience as if some people are born with it and others are not. I no longer believe that. Patience is not a temperament. It is a skill, and like every skill, it has to be taught and learned, and as usual, life is the best teacher.

Nobody learns patience in comfort. You learn it when there is no exit, when the only options are to lose your mind or to accept that the situation will end on its own schedule and not on yours.

When my wife is not home, I am the one. I cannot leave my daughter alone with her needs because the moment is inconvenient for me. So I learn.

That is the thing about patience. It cannot be explained, only survived.

The longer the road, the bigger the deal

Here is where my two lives start to rhyme.

In business, I have always known that good things take time. A deal can drag for months. The contract that matters is rarely the one that closes fast. And usually, the longer the road, the bigger the deal at the end of it. Trust compounds slowly, and the people who rush it tend to close small. Coming from B2B, it has been at the heart of every deal I've made.

But I understood it differently today, holding a baby who would not stop crying. The deal and the daughter ask for the exact same thing from me: presence without a guaranteed outcome.

Show up, stay, do not check the clock, do not demand a result on your timeline. It almost felt like a joke, realising that my newborn was teaching me the same lesson as 10 years of sales. Except she teaches it harder, because she does not care about me reaching the targets.

The market is the strictest teacher

And then there are the markets, the best and my oldest school of patience.

I have been into crypto for years, long enough to have watched the same scenario many times. The market drops, panic onboards, the big part of the crowd sells at the worst possible moment, swears off the whole thing, and disappears. Then time passes, quietly, indifferently, and the ones who simply stayed are the ones who are still there to talk about it (heya HODLERS).

I am not giving anyone financial advice. I have no idea what any asset will be tomorrow, and run away from anyone who tells you they do. But I can tell you what the market taught me about myself, which is that almost every mistake I have made, in investing and in life, came from confusing activity with progress. From needing to do something, right now, when the best move was to wait. The market rewards patience and punishes panic, over and over, until you finally learn, or until you quit (or until you are broke).

The S&P 500 dropped 38.5% in 2008. Anyone who invested at the 2007 peak watched their portfolio fall ~57% and didn't break even until 2013 causing that many panicked and sold. But take a step back: from the end of 2007 to today, the index is up ~366% in price, and over 500% with dividends reinvested (DRIP).

Most people only see the short term. The long term is where things actually grow, in a portfolio and in a person. The two are not so different.

Develop later

Almost two months into fatherhood, and here is the part I could not have scripted. While I was dictating this very article, talking out loud about patience with my phone in one hand, my daughter fell asleep in the other.

No trick, no position, no cheat code. She just decided, on her own schedule, that the moment had come (yeeeeey). Maybe she was listening. Maybe she finally took pity on her father. Or maybe that is exactly the lesson: the thing you wait for so hard often arrives the second you stop chasing it.

Life is a marathon, not a sprint. It is the oldest cliché in the book, and I used to roll my eyes at it. We French grow up with a politer version of it, learned by heart in school long before we understand it.

Rien ne sert de courir ; il faut partir à point.

— Jean de La Fontaine, Le Lièvre et la Tortue

There is no use in running; you have to leave on time. The tortoise never rushes, never panics, and arrives. I spent ninety minutes holding a screaming baby with no solution in sight, and that old fable finally stopped being a slogan and became a muscle.

She cried herself to sleep eventually. She took her time. She did not rush. But she got there.

So did I.