I’m sure you’ve heard this joke. One man asks another how he got invited to play at Carnegie Hall, to which his friend responds, “Practice, practice, practice.”

It’s good advice. In his best selling book, Outliers, The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell informs us that Bill Gates, the Beatles and Mozart all share, along with talent and ambition, an unusual opportunity to intensively cultivate a skill that allowed them to rise above their peers. For Gladwell, 10,000 hours of practice, practice, practice is the magic formula for success.

And yet so many of us are impatient, myself included, and want our success to come faster and easier. In our consumer oriented world, where we are constantly barraged by advertising that makes us believe we are entitled to what is being advertised, in a world where not only our needs but our desires are easy to obtain because of the accessibility of easy credit, it’s hard not to have instant gratification syndrome.

This, coupled with technological advances that make everything faster and faster, sets up expectations among us all regarding the length of time we should have to wait for anything, including success.

But becoming outstanding and successful takes practice, even if you have natural talents in that area. Olympic athletes aren’t born walking; for the most part they are like the rest of us. Usain Bolt, the three-time Olympic gold medalist in the 2008 Olympics undoubtedly had wobbly legs as he raised himself up for the first time while hanging onto a coffee table. With some practice, practice, practice, fast forward 17 years and he’s on an Olympic podium being celebrated as the fastest man in the world.

Another story also illustrates this point about success. A woman meets the artist Pablo Picasso in a café and asks him to doodle something for her. Twenty seconds later another Picasso original is on the back of a napkin. The woman reaches for the napkin and as she does, Picasso reportedly says, “Not so fast. That will be $100,000.” The indignant woman exclaims, “But that only took you 20 seconds,” to which Picasso replies, “Actually, it took me 30 years of practice to be able to do that in 20 seconds.”

Most of us become impatient about success for three reasons. First, we are usually unrealistic in estimating the amount of time it will take to become good at our craft. Social scientists tell us that it usually takes us longer than we anticipate, as is true with most anything. Second, we’re impatient because we don’t chunk our success journey down into smaller, easier to manage steps; it’s all about getting there and not the journey. And third, we don’t take the time or are too close to the situation to see that in fact we are making progress and are getting closer to our dream of success.

Here are a few suggestions to alleviate these realities and help you stay on the success track. First, talk to high achievers in your field and use their wisdom and experience about the journey to keep you motivated and patient. Second, at the beginning of every month, set a set of mini goals for yourself that will keep you moving towards your final goal. At the end of the month, evaluate your progress and celebrate your success.

Incorporating both these suggestions into your success journey will make progress easier to see and will decrease the chances that you’ll quit just before you reach your goal and the kind of success you’ve envisioned, which happens more often than it should.