Patience
I've spoken about how finding your big, burning WHY is vitally important to have. Your WHY keeps your overall actions headed towards your destination. Your WHY allows you to find ways past the obstacles that are sure to fall in front of you along the way.
Simply put, your WHY is vitally important. However, there are many complimentary characteristics that you should strengthen on the road towards your life goal. Patience is one of those characteristics.
But in today's world of instant gratification is patience endangered?
If you are at least as old as me, you might have first got on the internet by using a dial-up modem. My first one was a 28.8K and it was a couple years before I got a computer that had a 56.6K connection.
You remember how long it took to load a simple photo? Long enough that you had to really want it. Hell, now they say 40% of people will leave a website if the page doesn't load within 3 seconds. And don't even get me started on the amount of time was needed to download a 5mb file or a few songs off of Napster.
The thought of watching a streaming movie over the internet was science fiction.
Today that is immediately available. All I need do is click on a D.Tube or Youtube video and it plays right away. Don't want to cook? You can have a hot meal delivered to you in less than 30 minutes. Want to know the answer to something, Google will find it in a few seconds.
This quick or near instant delivery has given rise to what is becoming known as the convenience society. Amazon has done their part to add and then take advantage of this societal change. Now you can get almost anything by the next day and often within 1 or 2 hours if you live in a city where the aptly named Amazon Now is active.
I'm not going to say that all this is the leading cause of the apparent increase in impatience in society, but I think it has helped.
Have you guys heard of the “marshmallow” experiment in which they place a marshmallow in front of young children and tell them that if they don't eat it for 15 minutes they will get another one.
It was found those children that could not wait had lower incomes and worse health than those who could resist the temptation. But did you know that there was another study performed on 13-year-olds where they were offered $140 now or $1,400 in 5 years.
The children that wanted the money now were found to have a 32% greater chance to be convicted of a crime within the next 18 years. Impatient people think in the short term and not of the long-term positive or negative effects of their actions.
Maybe we won't get arrested, but I am sure all of us feel impatient from time to time. I know I do. However, here are some things to remember about the virtue of patience to get us back on track.
Patience is Success
No big goal is achieved overnight. Because it can't be acquired by next-day delivery, a person heading towards success knows that these things take time. That same person probably knows that impatience can create a host of problems, mistakes, and poor outcomes. Often impatience can result in a huge setback.
Take the crypto mindset over the past few months. The rapid rise of the coin market has attracted a majority of people with the “get rich quick” mindset. Basically you could have bought any crypto last summer and seen an enormous return within the next 6 months.
In response, a host of shady and scammy people have come to feast on this easy money. You get the people who did fake ICO's and disappeared with the money. You have Ponzi schemes like bitconnect shoot through the roof before they came crashing down. Basically, it has drawn in everyone looking for a shortcut to success.
The crypto lottery ticket promises money without work. No effort required. Those things hardly ever work out as intended.
Success is a long-term commitment and there will be many times where you have done all you can and the only action left is to wait. Now that the crypto market has leveled off for a few weeks, those seeking the easy money have lost interest.
Those of us with a success mindset and patience appear to be doing nothing, but that is not true. We are fully involved and paying close attention. We might wait at times but during that period we are always looking for our next opportunity to take action.
Patience is Compassion
Without patience, life can be one agitation after another. You will often be annoyed, bad-tempered, and agitated. Being a patient person frees you from these negative thoughts and emotions. It will keep you calm while others would be stressed.
Imagine being in a traffic jam when someone quickly cuts in front of you trying to maneuver between lanes to get ahead. Being in the traffic jam would already be enough to seriously agitate an impatient person, having someone cut in front of them might send them over the top!
A patient person would remain calm and maybe even laugh at the silly person going from this lane to that as he or she knows that all that effort will only gain them mere seconds in the end. The cars are backed up for miles anyway.
My wife and I have two young children, ages 1 and almost 3. Often my young daughter comes into the room (after being told not to) where I am writing and interrupts me. Interruptions as I write often disrupt my train of thought and it can take me time to gain back my writing focus.
I try to keep it in my mind that she does this only out of her love for me. She doesn't do it to ruin my work. So when I remember that she is an innocent child, I banish any irritation building up and think about how fortunate I am to have my beautiful children.
You see, often you can remain patient by envisioning the situation from the other persons point of view. If you go out to grab lunch and the wait becomes excessive, remember that the workers are doing the best they can during the busy lunch rush. Maybe one cooktop has broken or an employee (or two) called in sick. They are not taking a long time to spite you.
Patience is not Procrastination
Remember that patience in achieving your goal is waiting or biding your time while your efforts take hold. The key thing is that you did your part and, for the moment, there is nothing else you can do. That is not procrastination. Procrastination is waiting to do your part of the effort.
In another way, patience is waiting contently as there is absolutely nothing else you can do while procrastination is putting off what you could be doing right now.
Patience is a positive characteristic, procrastination is an excuse to not do something.
Conclusion
Patience can help you succeed on the journey towards your big goal in life. But it also helps in a myriad of other ways too. I mean, who wants to hang around an impatient person who is quick to anger? Is that a person you want to have a relationship with?
Also, if you have patience you are able to think about the big picture and how you are doing so far. This reflection allows you to think over everything and have a deeper understanding of what your next steps could be in your plan.
An impatient person might choose to just do something even if that action causes more harm than anything else.
In the end, patience will get you to where you want to go. And while you are on the way you will head there much happier with far less stress as you will be able to calmly decide the better courses of action to take.