What the Truffles Taught Me About Patience
Nobody talks about patience anymore.
We talk about hustle. We talk about growth hacks. We talk about disruption and moving fast and breaking things. We celebrate the founder who went from zero to a million users in six months. We celebrate the algorithm. The overnight success. The viral moment.
We don’t celebrate waiting.
I spent many years waiting for a black truffle to show up in the dirt. Not hoping. Waiting. Actively, deliberately, every winter, digging in the same forests, looking for something I couldn’t see or touch until the exact moment it was ready. I even had a dream about truffles. It was so weird. I saw that when I (finally) found a truffle, beams of blue light immediately appeared throughout the forest, showing the exact location of all the truffles nearby. I remember that a feeling of warmth and happiness surrounded my body.
Most people would call that insane. The whole obsession with finding truffles. But the worst was when something was telling me to quit. Something was actively turning my thoughts into a loop, making me feel like there is no purpose in that.
The Year I Almost Quit
Year three was the worst.
I’d been hunting for three years with almost nothing to show for it. A few truffles, sure. Enough to know I wasn’t completely wrong about where to look. But not enough to justify the time, the cold, the mud that never quite washes out of your boots.
I remember standing in a forest near Pieria in January, my hands numb, my dog circling the same oak tree she’d circled a hundred times before. We’d been there for hours. Nothing. The previous three winters had been like this. Lots of hours. Lots of nothing.
That night I seriously considered stopping.
I called a friend who’s a software engineer. I told him about the truffle situation. He laughed and said, “Dude, just build an app. Make something millions of people use. Scale it. Get acquired. That’s patience — waiting two, maybe three years for an exit.”
He wasn’t wrong, technically. But he’d missed the actual difference.
Why a Truffle Is Nothing Like a Startup
Here’s what a truffle knows that a founder doesn’t: you can’t optimize the wait.
A black truffle (Tuber melanosporum) takes seven to fifteen years to mature. You can’t speed this up. You can’t throw money at it. You can’t hire more people. You can’t pivot to a faster-growing truffle species. You can’t implement growth hacks on the mycelium.
The truffle exists according to its own timeline. The earth has its own timeline. And if you want what the earth is growing, you have to sync with that timeline, not the other way around.
A startup founder doesn’t have that luxury — or that clarity. We’re taught to move fast. To validate assumptions. To get to product-market fit. To scale before someone else does. Every day you’re not growing is a day a competitor is eating your lunch.
So we build for speed. We optimize for the quarterly earnings call. We chase the growth chart.
But the truffle reminds you: some things grow on their own timeline, and the only way to get them is to stop trying to make them faster.
The Turning Point
Year five, something shifted.
Not in the forest. In me.
I stopped trying to find truffles and started trying to understand them. I stopped checking boxes (did I search enough sites? did I cover enough ground?) and started asking questions. What does the soil need to look like? What happens after the first frost? Which tree relationships are symbiotic? Why does this grove fruit every year but that one doesn’t?
I started keeping records. Soil samples. Temperature logs. Rainfall patterns. I started mapping the groves, not as places to hunt, but as systems.
By year six, I wasn’t just finding truffles. I was understanding why they appeared where they appeared. I could walk into a forest and know where the truffles would be in December, four months before I dug them up.
I became so sure about knowing where to find each truffle species that two particular experiences proved it to me. The first was with another truffle hunter who asked me whether I could find white truffles in his region. Not only did I find a great spot after two or three days, but I went there after a five-hour trip, and with our dogs went straight to that place and dug up almost 500 g of precious white truffles (Tuber magnatum).
The second time was when I had suspicions on the existence of Périgord black truffles in a very remote place in a mountain. I double- and triple-checked whether Tuber melanosporum could exist in that region that I was 100% sure that when I go there, I would find some. And that’s the way it happened. I went there and almost lost my car. The region was dry, full of limestone rocks, with only a few trees and a dangerously sloping landscape. After a couple of hours, I found some small wild Périgord black truffles, I felt as if I was the only one who had ever found these truffles in Greece, and I just left. I went straight home and never told anyone about this. Until now.
This is the thing nobody tells you about patience: it’s not just about waiting.
It’s about the clarity that waits bring.
When you’re chasing quarterly growth, you don’t see patterns that take years to emerge. You don’t have the luxury of standing still long enough to understand a system. You’re always moving to the next milestone.
But when you commit to the wait — when you say, “I’m going to understand this one thing, and it’s going to take as long as it takes” — something opens up. You start seeing the actual structure of what you’re doing. The real variables. The actual cause and effect.
Get Anastasios Papalias’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
This is why truffles and tech are completely different. Tech rewards speed. Truffles reward understanding. And the only way to understand something deeply is to be patient enough to let the system reveal itself.
What Patience Actually Costs
Here’s the hard part: I could have done something else with those ten years.
I could have gotten a different job. I could have built something. I could have made more money. I could have won some competition or built some resume credential.
Instead, I spent ten years getting dirty in the forest looking for fungus.
This is what patience costs: opportunity. Speed. The feeling that you’re winning some game that everyone else is playing.
But here’s what patience gave me: certainty.
I don’t wonder if truffles are real. I’ve held them in my hands hundreds of times. I don’t have to trust someone else’s research or follow someone else’s methodology. I know. From direct experience. From ten years of paying attention.
That kind of certainty is rare. Most of our knowledge is borrowed. We learn from books, from courses, from other people’s experiments. That’s not bad. But it’s different from the certainty that comes from *doing* something for long enough that you can’t help but understand it.
In technology, we call this “deep expertise.” In nature, it’s just what happens when you pay attention long enough.
Why This Matters Now
We’re living in the age of the quick win. The viral growth. The hustle culture that treats patience like a character flaw.
But the world still has truffle moments. Moments that require you to commit to something without knowing if it will work. Without a timeline. Without guaranteed returns.
Writing a book takes years, and there’s no guarantee anyone will read it.
Building a real company (not a funded startup, but an actual business that makes real money) takes five to ten years before you can even see what’s working.
Mastering a craft — music, painting, code, whatever — takes a decade minimum before you’re actually good.
Learning a language to fluency. Running a marathon. Building a relationship. Raising a child. Healing from something broken.
These things don’t happen on the optimization curve. They happen on the truffle curve. You show up. You pay attention. You stay committed to understanding over winning. And eventually — not when it’s convenient, when it’s *ready* — something opens up.
The Real Lesson
On the surface, the truffle taught me patience.
But the actual lesson is deeper: patience is what you practice when you care about understanding more than you care about winning.
Every winter I went back to those forests not because I was sure I’d find something, but because I wanted to understand. I wanted to know how this system worked. I wanted to learn what the earth was trying to grow.
That’s why I kept going.
And that’s why, eventually, I found what I was looking for.
Not because I was patient. But because understanding required patience, and I loved understanding more than I hated the wait.
An Offering
If you’re building something — a company, a book, a relationship, a skill — and you’re starting to feel like the wait is too long, the progress too slow, the timeline too uncertain, remember the truffle.
It doesn’t care about your timeline. It cares about being ready. And the only way for you to be ready is to stop optimizing for speed and start optimizing for understanding.
That takes patience.
But the truffle knows: some things are worth the wait.
I spent ten years to learn this. Then I spent six months turning everything I learned into a book: Beneath the Soil: The Complete Truffle Manual.
It covers the science, the geography, the technique. But more than that, it documents what patience actually looks like when you commit to understanding something deeply — not for speed, not for growth, but for the thing itself.
Because sometimes, the best thing you can do is slow down.
