for me personally; Patience.. xD Starting up a new tank, without old sponges/filter media eetc, will take ages to get your tank cycled enough to introduce stock. xD Sooo.. as impatient as I am, I went all around the area to various public ponds and gathered small samples (simple 250-300ml jam jars) with substrate and or water and or leaf litter from those ponds and put all of those in with my fresh tapwater to get a semblance of a tank that's got a headstart at being established.
Still after 1 week i introduced a daphnia culture and 3 nerite snails, then a week later (probably safe as my nh2/3 and no3/4 readings were fine) I've introduced my first group of fish (5 male endlers) and next week I'll possibly add an otocinclus or 2 the week after that some cherry shrimp and perhaps also some female endlers.
But man the waiting every time is so hard xD hahaha
So in the meantime I keep messing around with live plants. introducing new ones, moving old ones around etc...