What is patience but a key to success8 min read

While doing my research for this article I was amused to see how neglected the topic

of patience is on the internet.

I mean the astounding amount of hacks, quick fixes and sure fire easy ways to do something

have been shared around tremendously. People are looking for quick fixes and there are people

that are claiming of providing them.

Now I might be bad at doing quantitative research on the internet but it was amazing to see

Now how can we be surprised? It’s the age of speed, the age of fast food, speed dating and

make it big quickly. Our attention span is lower than a goldfish. Ours is 8 seconds, theirs 9.

To sum it up quickly we have the lowest attention span in the world compared to any other

living creature on this planet, which equals to extremely low levels of patience.

Having patience is a power. Not having patience is an accident. Let’s get to know

why is it the key to success?

1.     Impatience is energy wasted, patience is giving it a direction

Do you notice the trembling, boiling and overflowing agitated anxiety ridden energy circulating

throughout your body when something is delayed? Do you have that irresistible nagging to

make a phone call again to a business prospect or that special someone?

Going through an entire day without doing anything because you are waiting for that one thing

to happen right. Waiting on to receive a reply to an email you sent. Growing impatient

throughout the day.

And we all know how it ends when we make that second phone call or delay everything else

because one thing is being delayed. Neither this happened, nor that happened. Total

time in equity wasted.

Then we realize only if I had waited patiently to do this particular thing and patiently continued

working on the other, at least one of them could have been a success. Even if they both had failed

at the least I would have lead a happy day in peace, not drenched in stress and anxiety.

So when impatient:

1. Notice how it feels. Is your breathing uneven? Is your body itching to do something? And

do you feel consumed by a single thought?

2. Next sit calmly, breathe deeply, try to calm your nerves down, I know it will be difficult but

try. Then try to rationalize your impatience with the best logic possible.

3. Then finally throw all the logic out the window and come to in terms with reality, which is

nothing in this world is in your control. The only thing you can control is your action right now.

Be patient by:

1. After the point 3 above, channel all that impatient energy in doing something else, something

productive furiously. Focus like a laser, to the point where you forget your current situation

and solely are doing that which you are doing.

do not waste this energy which has bubbled up inside you when you first got impatient.

2. Contrary to popular belief doing something all the time is not beneficial. Sometimes you must

rest, breathe deeply, enjoy just being and see if you can read a good book, watch a good movie

or play an amazing game.

Some situations in life are too grave to be solved by action again. Sometimes being non-reactive

is the best solution.

3. Whatever happens never be impatient, one thing ends another begins. One door closes another

opens. Learn to let go of things in life completely. You will notice yourself what I am trying to

convey here.

2.     There are no quick fixes. Think about the bigger picture

Quick fixes are like a castle of cards. One blow of wind and poof! It comes crumbling down. Whereas an

actual real castle takes years to build. The Taj Mahal took 22 years for completion, yes, sure, the technology

was poor, however each and every inch of it was crafted with detail by manual labor, patiently.

Still stands the test of time, is one of the 7 wonders in the world and a world heritage monument. Incase

alien’s visit we already have some remarkable things to show.

Malcolm Gladwell in one of his books mentions a 10,000 hour rule. Claiming that to achieve world class excellence in anything requires 10,000 hours of practice in a correct way.

You will be putting yourself in a delusion if you believe some weird technique is going to make you master in 90 days or less.

We are overly result oriented, we are concerned about the outcome. We want it quick and someone has

promised a quick miracle. Each day when we are nearing to our prescribed Deadline we start losing our patience and in return we start feeling demotivated, to the point where we give up.

In that impatience we make wrong decisions in haste, we are more prone to giving up and we start losing faith

in the process or our work. We start finding faults in everything else, rather than understanding great things take time.

Patience gives you:

1. A vision, which enables you to craft a realistic plan, you understand the amount of effort it’s going to take

and it helps you fathom a realistic time duration about when you would see some results.

2. It will help you make thoughtful changes to your plans if something does not work. You will not think of

giving up or abandon doing what you are pursuing and go out seeking something new entirely.

Example: the age of fad diet.

3. It keeps you satisfied with your work rather than its outcome, Yes, you should make changes, you should

try working harder and try to achieve the desired result but the way patience will help you is by providing

you the required endurance. The power to keep trying.

The only thing you should think about if you want to think logically is about what control do you really have over the world? How many times have you benefited by acting on impulse? And how many times you regretted giving up too soon, Because of not seeing the results quickly enough.

3.     Stop trying to fast forward the movie

A boring movie will not become entertaining if you fast forward it, it will actually become even more unpleasant, fast moving pictures and gibberish sounds. A clear sense of disorientation.

Abandoning the movie in-between is time and money wasted. Above all you did not even get to know what was

the ending. Sometimes you have to endure through a boring first half to enjoy an amazing second half.

There are 3 things into play here

1. You should have selected carefully what you really wanted to watch.
2. We cannot always practically know if the movie is good, just because the trailer was.
3. The ending might not be so predictable after all, it could actually be really mind blowing.

The way you can apply this analogy in life is:

1. First think. What do you really want to do in your life?
2. Is it really what you want? Cause just because the trailer looks good, does not mean it’s going to be cool.

A fitness model like body may seem like a great trailer, when you encounter the journey, chuck it.

3. Now the food might be blunt, routine might be tough, but the results sure are life changing. Do not quit

just because you cannot keep up.

So when you stop being in a hurry and start being patient. When you stop running here and there and focus on

something patiently you start seeing the truth about it.

You are ready to endure if needed, you are ready to wait if needed and like a movie you sure do get an intermission in life but remember the climax is always after it. So you must hold tight and keep persevering.

Every day is a new movie, every day there is an intermission and every day there is a climax. Enduring through the trials, thinking thoughtfully about the situation and acting patiently will take you long way in life. Also always remember sometimes acting patiently is doing nothing at all. Let the movie play continually, don’t stop, pause or close it.

Just keep observing until you see a correct moment to act.

Conclusion

Everything you want to do in life is going to require a lot of resilience. Whatever you want to master in life is going to take a lot of practice. If you think you have less time to achieve something, then you better fail than hurrying towards it. Because whatever you will cook is going to be half done, half cooked food is hard to digest, not palatable and uneatable.

Cook one dish but cook it with perfection. Instead of revisiting a chapter, learn it wholeheartedly the first time,

saving yourself time and effort. Do not hurry, why would you want to hurry through life?

Do you want to be buried sooner? You do understand that completing your goals is kind of completing certain amount of your life right? Means your original conclusion is nearing, do you want it to be fast?

If not then, work with patience. Enjoy your journey. Make it a pleasant one. Do not stress all the time. Nothing is in our control but our state, action and emotions are. Make the best of them. Life is going to pass anyway, things will happen or not happen anyway. So focus on your work and life until the point which is in your control.

After that let go and continue doing something else which is in your control. Don’t stop but do not be in a hurry either. have fun.