Wait for It!
Good things are worth waiting for
Hi friend,
How are you? Hope you’re having a fabulous spring.
Pay attention to your routines. Sometimes, hidden, an important lesson is waiting.
Yesterday afternoon, after a long time, I felt like baking a fresh pita bread for dinner.
Following my old recipe, I added 2 cups of all-purpose flour and gradually 3/4 cup of warm water to my machine kneader.
Right there was lurking the classic trap I’ve been falling into every time.
You know how it’s like? You start seeing the grainy dough, and are quickly tempted to add more water.
Big mistake!
It’s the shortest way to lose that delicate water-to-flour equilibrium point.
Soon enough, you’ll get into this endless duel of adding more flour, making the dough too dry, and then adding more water, making it too moist.
By the third round, you end up with a sticky dough that you must trash.
Instead, yesterday I decided to give it more time, while increasing the kneading speed.
And guess what! After 5 minutes, I received the tightest, smoothest, most elastic dough ball ever!
All I had to do was…
Wait for it!
The old saying “Good things are worth waiting for” typically highlights the value of patience, reminding us that meaningful outcomes, opportunities, or growth often take time and steady effort to unfold.
You could be in the throes of a rollercoaster working in a startup or a demanding new job where all you see is a big blur (e.g., yeah, that grainy flour) with no clear horizon.
But hey, sometimes you gotta trust the process or the recipe.
It feels hard because you just left your comfort zone, and that means you’re learning something new.
In addition to the misleading initial chaos, there is another important concept here.
What you’re looking at is, in fact, the magic of Ambiguous Challenges I covered in:
If everything you put your mind to was easy, you’d soon be bored out of your mind. We all need a healthy dose of uncertain challenge to keep us going.
Visual Storytelling
In visual storytelling, conflict with uncertain odds is an essential ingredient.
That’s why you’ll find content creators use this stalling technique on TikTok or Instagram.
By now, it carries its own “Wait For It” hashtag and often comes as a textual overlay to explicitly signal viewers to wait and watch the entire clip.
It’s an effective way to stretch people's 8-second attention span and get them to watch the entire 90-second video where the payoff or punch line awaits.
It also works well when you build your story and want to create tension.
I’ve been teaching Brand Storytelling for the past five years at the Business School of the University of Miami.
One of the typical tendencies I see in my students’ projects and also in the market at large is to skip obstacles and rush too soon to Act 3 - the resolution.
I addressed this gap in my story:
Planning a new visual story?
Consider starting your story with a strong attention grabber and applying “Wait-for-It” tactics to keep your audience glued, clinging to the highs and lows of your story arc until the very end payoff.
See you next time!
Best,
- Shlomi
Shlomi Ron
Chief Storytelling Officer
shlomi@visualstorytell.com
Visual Storytelling Institute
story > visual > emotion > experience
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