I’ve spent the last ten days sick.

Not the most inspirational start to a post, but work with me on this one. When you spend the better part of two weeks popping cough drops like they were Skittles, and the majority of your evenings willing your eyes open so you can finish up the work that simply must get done lest the powers that be strike you down, you learn some important lessons.

The first is that in almost every case, a good organizational strategy beats out a lot of “hard work.” As it turns out, we waste a spectacular amount of working hours trying to figure out what work we should be working on. When you are running on “flu time” you become intimately aware of these wasted cycles, and a lot more motivated to excise them from your schedule.

Number two is the subject of this post, and that is the importance of patience.

It’s a little scary how many businesses fail because people rush to put on the roof before the foundations have dried. It’s only when you are forced to slow down because your lungs are threatening to forcibly remove themselves from your body that you really recognize this. As sexy as it is to be constantly spinning out new ideas and expanding into new territory, it does you exactly no good if by doing so you are neglecting your core business.

Often the best thing you can do for yourself is to tie up loose ends, to look at all the projects that you have completed and see where you can improve them, to pause building out new features and instead take some time to see what people are doing with the ones you already have.

As simple as this seems, it’s the hardest thing in the world for entrepreneurial types. It means that you need to be willing to let your numbers flatline for a while. What’s addictive about constant expansion is that you are constantly finding new people to see your stuff. You’re marketing and people are coming in by the truckload and you feel like you’re actually doing something. When you stop expanding, those people start coming more slowly and while you are improving the experience for everyone who is already there, increased happiness is a metric that is much harder to measure.

Happiness, however, is the only thing that matters in the long term. If people like what you’re doing, they will come back for more. If they like what you’re doing, they will tell their friends. If they like what you’re doing, they will forgive you a delayed feature or a few extra weeks of stagnation. Patience gives you the clarity to see this and the willingness to stop every once in a while and make your projects better instead of just bigger.

There is no magic bullet solution to training patience, but if you want a little hint from me, getting really close with someone with the Flu doesn’t hurt.

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