The cure for impatience is to get more trees! The "correct size" collection of bonsai and pre-bonsai is to have enough trees that you have a hard time keeping up with all of them. If you are always a little behind on keeping up with bonsai tasks, then you will be able to leave a tree alone for a while without over-working it to death. I'm partly joking, partly serious. If you have a collection of 30 or 50 or even 100 sticks in pots, you then have a large enough group that you can let a few grow for a number of years without impatience. This works for a while. Young trees, the proverbial "sticks in pots" take very little work. Often you cut one or two branches, then leave them alone for one or two or even 3 years. Having the patience to do this for one lone "stick in a pot" is difficult. But if you have a larger bunch of them, it becomes much easier to let them grow, when they need to grow.
The downside of this approach is that as trees develop, they need more time and effort from their grower. It is hard to appreciate, until you have a mature bonsai of medium or large size. I have a jack pine that is "not ready" for its first show yet. It is large enough, with enough branches that just applying wire requires about 10 to 15 hours. I have to spread the work out over several days. Obviously if I had a collection of 100 trees at this stage of development, I simply would not be able to keep up and have a life. Patience would be easy, because you'd always be in a state of panic, because you are so far behind on bonsai tasks. So if you do build a collection of sticks in pots, remember, as they develop, they will require more time than you might expect. Plan on your bonsai collections to be dynamic, rather than static in their numbers. While your trees are young, you can amass a bunch of them without outstriping your ability to care for them. But as they develop, plan to continuously downsize your collection, re-homing, or composting the least developed as the better trees begin to demand more time. When you are pressed for time, it is time to evaluate, and discard the trees "that no longer bring you joy". Hopefully when your collection is a larger number of "sticks in pots" you will discover which species appeal to your sense of design. Which ones reward your work. Which ones grow well for you. For example, I've discovered I love azalea. I love cork bark JBP, and jack pines. I love persimmons. I have also discovered that boxwood, junipers, elms and a number of plain leafy green trees bore me. I have discovered that Japanese maples require more skill to cultivate than I am willing to invest. (I can keep them happy, but it is more work than I can keep up with). Trees that are susceptible to late spring frosts, trees that sprout a few weeks before our average last frost, simply don't do well for me. I refuse to do the "in and out dance", with trees to protect them from late frosts. This means Japanese maples die in my care, as they tend to leaf out about 2 to 3 weeks too early. These are things a larger collection of "sticks in pots" will teach you. The trick is to learn from this phase, and to downsize quickly when the time demands of the collection begin to increase.
A mature bonsai will require several 4 hour or more sessions per year of pruning, wiring, repotting, or other work. This is hard to appreciate if your experience so far is only a juniper from a shopping mall. Young trees need only a little pruning, then they need to grow. Intermediate trees, need serious attention to wiring and shaping, which if they have any size to them can mean hours of applying wire and getting their positions correct. Advanced trees need incredible amounts of detail work. Wire for the finest of branches, detail pruning of hundreds of branches, the detail required can be daunting.
To learn bonsai quickly, one needs a collection that is varied in levels of development as bonsai. It is not as important to have varied species, it is levels of development that is important. A few "sticks in pots", seedlings, and then one or two collected trees with some caliper to their trunks, so you are not having to wait for the trunks to grow. Then you need at least one or two trees in advanced stages of development. These last 2 can be expensive. But it is worth the investment. It is possible to barter either time or goods in exchange for good trees. Sometimes bonsai clubs hold estate sales to disperse a deceased members trees. Even better, sometimes a bonsai club member of a "certain age" will hold their estate sale before they are deceased. Here you can negotiate with the tree's owner, sometimes a bargain can be struck. Bonsai clubs, bonsai societies are still a really good resource when seeking out trees of advanced development. It is worth joining a club, and finding a mentor. The prices the bonsai professionals ask for advanced, developed trees are reasonable, even though they may take your breath away. If you figure $25 per hour for the time invested in training a tree, and $10 per hour for time in just the simple horticulture of a tree, many trees are bargains even with their hefty price tags.
So try to develop a collection of varied species, and of varied stages of development. Doing so will provide the most rapid way to learn all phased of bonsai. I did go off on a tangent. Originally just replying to the issue of patience. A varied collection with some advanced trees, will give you so much to do that you won't have time to need to practice patience.
he's booked in for his training on Saturday 
