My next-to-last job in my business career will be for the fatigued and frustrated CEO who taps me on the shoulder and asks, “Mark, can you take over because I know you’ll get this business back on its feet and begin to thrive again?”

When I nod in approval, I’ll do so knowing two of my biggest limitations. I’m impatient and don’t like to get bogged down in details, which is why I like to act quickly when a business is faltering. Accordingly, I find myself revisiting the wisest CEOs I’ve ever served who possessed an intelligent, discerning, and patient mindset.

Barry Orscheln, someone I liked, admired, and appreciated in my past, had a great deal of patient capital. I never understood how or why he could be so patient amid turbulence and uncertainty in businesses under his stewardship.

Is having patient capital a good thing or the opposite? I believe there are two sides to the coin when it comes to patient capital. In this retrospective, I’m going to address exactly what patient capital is and why we probably want to heed Thomas Sowell’s words when it comes to precious, limited resources with alternative uses.

I’ll also clearly define what patient capital is not, and the three major reasons CEOs do not cut bait on poor-performing investments they made years earlier.

By the way, this is not a dairy entry to support my limitations in patience. Rather, I want to attack this topic both fairly and holistically.