The Patience Layer: You Can't Rush the Sweetness #76
Cranking the flame doesn't make things sweet—it burns the pan. Week 76 explores the father-son bond forged over crab hunting and lap Zoom calls, Dr. Goodman on nervous-system sweet spots, and why the payoff you're sprinting toward is already here. 🧅
When my son was a baby, I had the neighbor watch him during my Zoom calls so I could look professional. Executives on the other end, me trying to seem like a man who had it all handled. Then she hurt her shoulder and couldn't do it anymore. No backup, no plan, no choice. So I put him on my lap and kept working.
I was mad at myself about it at first. Embarrassed a little. Two screens on the desk, his cartoons playing low on one, my meeting on the other, my own mic muted until it was my turn to talk so nobody would hear the theme song. I was sure it broadcast to everyone on the call that I was being a little unprofessional, that I couldn't even hand my kid off for an hour to do this the professional way.
Then the thing I was ashamed of turned into the best thing I had. The tech guys on the call started saying it. Look how calm he is. He's getting so big. How cool, just chilling on your lap. Larry sees him there in our sessions and brings him up like he's the whole point. And somewhere in those muted, messy mornings the bond between me and my boy got stronger than it has ever been. I'm not completely reckless about it. New clients still get the buttoned-up version, scheduled for a Thursday or Friday or after six, on the days my wife works from home and can take him. But the ones who have been with me a while get both of us.
Here's the part that started this week. I catch myself rushing toward the day I finally make it. And the day I make it is the day these mornings end. That's the whole layer.
Caramelization Can't Be Rushed
Anyone who has actually cooked onions down knows the secret is that there is no secret. Low heat. A long time. You stand there and tend them. Turn the flame up to hurry the sweetness and you don't get there faster, you get bitter and burnt. The deep, dark, sweet thing you wanted is something only time makes. There is no high-heat shortcut to depth. There never has been, for onions or for anything else.
And I am always reaching for the knob.
The Stolen Scoreboard
The heat under my pan was never really my own pace. I out-work most people I know. The heat is comparison. It's measuring my actual life against some number in my head of where I should be by now.
And here's what took me too long to see. The clocks I was racing were fake. The garage guru who sold me the book-a-day hustle lost a hundred million dollars of other people's money. There was a whole wave of them back in 2013, lighting the fire under me with the funnels, the systems, the lead magnets. Most are gone now, convicted, vanished, or still grifting the same course to the next desperate version of me. I was sprinting to catch a race that did not exist, set by people lying about their own place in it. That's not impatience. That's a stolen scoreboard, and I'm the one who handed it to them.
Devotion, Not Manifestation
A line I keep coming back to, from Nicolas Canon: live by devotion instead of manifestation. Manifestation is me with both hands on the wheel, forcing the outcome onto my calendar. Like Larry always tells me, every time I plan, God laughs. Devotion is trusting the slow plan and tending the pan while it cooks.
I already made the devotional move once, the big one. I walked out of the family business to go do my own thing. The life I have now, this desk, that boy, 76 of these, is what the slow plan handed back. Put it next to the life I would have had if I'd stayed. It isn't close.
Let me be clear about one thing so this doesn’t go soft. Devotion is not the couch. Hell, I can’t even remember the last show I watched on Netflix, outside of family movie night. Low heat still means standing at the stove every single day. It isn’t sit back and wait for the universe. It’s stop cranking the flame and trust the tending. I still have doors to build, a business to grow, and a newsletter I’m committed to that’s changed my life in more ways than one. I just don’t have to burn the house down to do it.
What I'm Actually Rushing Toward
Here's the gut-punch I keep walking into. I rush toward the payoff. Bring Ashley home. Build the life we planned for our son. And the thing I am rushing through to get there is the payoff.
Monday through Wednesday, while his mom is at work, him and I bond hard. Mom leaves, we play a little, until my first Zoom call. He sits with me while I work, then we get ready and go. The park. The library. A Publix cookie. Crab hunting. Little fiddler crabs, tiny bodies and one big claw, down near our place. He points and calls himself a crab hunter, and my whole job is to catch them without getting bit while he cheers me on. We collect a few, and later, when he's distracted back home, I carry them back to their spot so they can go on living. I've been in this moment for three years now, and I finally recognize it for the devotion it is. I'm so grateful to simmer in it, fully present, actually enjoying our crab adventures while I'm in them.
If I turn the heat up to reach the life faster, I scorch that. The thing I'm chasing is already in the pan, going slow.
You
So what are you forcing on high heat right now, sure that more flame means faster, when the thing you actually want was only ever going to come slow? What present are you sprinting through to reach a payoff that the present is already quietly handing you?
This week, pick one. One thing you're forcing. Turn the knob down on purpose and give it the time it actually needs. Then go stand at the stove and tend it. That's the whole move. Low and slow, until it turns sweet.
Still here, pan on low, in no rush to burn the best years to get to the next ones. Same peel, done cranking the heat. Let's build from here. 🧅
Want to write through these same layers and make them your own?
The "Being Coached" Layer: The Sweet Spot of Low and Slow
My whole work is helping high performers get out of their own way, and the way out is the thing you already named this week. Low and slow. I was taught the opposite. Old school, balls to the wall, pedal to the metal. All that does is create material fatigue and failure. More is not better. Faster is not better. The object is to find your sweet spot, learn what it actually feels like in your body, and stay right there. Because you are exactly where you’re supposed to be, doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. Low and slow.
You asked me for an example from my own life. Here it is. Taking care of my wife, Sally. Thirty years together and there were things I never did, never once thought were my job. Then she hurt her neck, had the surgery, and now I fill the bird feeder and the bird bath every single day. At the start it frustrated me, pissed me off. But the journey turned out to be the whole point, and I would have missed it if the injury had never happened. That is what a crisis really is. Opportunity in disguise, handing you the chance to grow by doing the exact things you swore you’d never do. That’s the truth.
The Takeaway for You: Stop confusing fast with strong. Pushing past your limit doesn’t make you tougher, it just wears the material down until it cracks. Find your sweet spot, turn the flame down, and trust the low and slow. The thing in front of you that feels like it’s blocking your real work, that is the work.
Bookshelf Peeled - The Myth of Clearing the Pan
In Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman dismantles the ultimate modern delusion: the belief that if you just work faster, optimize your calendar, and crank the heat high enough, you will finally "get on top of your life." Burkeman points out that the average human lifespan is absurdly short—about four thousand weeks. The trap of modern productivity culture is treating this limited time like an obstacle to conquer rather than the container we live in. When you try to hurry the process, you don't win back control; you just increase the volume of noise and burn through the very life you were hoping to enjoy.
This connects directly to the stolen scoreboard and the urge to force outcomes on high heat. Burkeman’s antidote is what he calls "efforts at patience"—accepting that meaningful things (raising a child, building a sovereign business, mastering a craft) take the time they take. Hurrying through the lap mornings and the crab hunting to reach some imaginary future where everything is "handled" is a fool's errand. The future isn't hiding behind a faster pace. The present moment, messy and slow as it is, is all you ever get.
The Takeaway for You: Stop treating your current life like a waiting room for your real life. You cannot out-hustle the finite nature of time, and you cannot optimize your way out of the slow work. Turn the flame down, abandon the illusion that you’ll ever finish everything, and dedicate yourself to tending what is right in front of you today.
Four Thousand Weeks
by Oliver Burkeman
Design Rebel: From Prompt to Polished
Inspired this week by real life, real crab catching—half the size, actually only about the size of a quarter, but needed to be dramatic for a movie. Claws too small to hurt.
Behind the Build: This week hits right at the heart of the daily battle—the endless cycle of waiting for the "perfect moment" to launch, only to realize the struggle is real and getting ready was just procrastination in disguise. While Leonardo.ai, Veo 3.1, and ElevenLabs generated the raw visual and audio assets, the real breakthrough happened in post-production. Every layer—from the tension-building whisper audio stack to the desktop folder opacity overlays—was manually edited, structured, and synchronized frame-by-frame in Wondershare Filmora to protect the creative vision.
This Got Me Thinking:
Here are a few real shots from my phone. The mangrove crabs are actually quarter-sized with claws too small to hurt—I just scaled them up in the video above for a little cinematic drama. But the weekly routine is 100% real: him pointing down in the dirt, telling me, "Dada, I'm a crab hunter." That’s the low-and-slow plan right there. 🧅
Dada and his crab hunter.
P.S. If this resonates with you, share it with someone. I'm dedicated to helping fellow explorers—or anyone who found this page—uncover their authentic self with humor and insight. We're all in this together, finding the courage to truly live from our core essence (or as close as we can get!).
The Finish Layer: Knowing When to Stop
Fridays with Goodman: A striving artist, a Good-man and the Universal Principles at Play. by Martin Casado
