Patience has a bad reputation. People see it as tedious, boring, and passive.
But there's a real sense in which patience is powerful. Learning to allow things to take the time they need is a special virtue. Moreover, trying to make things go faster often just ends in wasted effort, anxiety, and heartache.
One of the great benefits of patience is it allows you to engage more fully with the present moment. You gain more satisfaction & greater understanding from being curious about how things unfold, instead of just wishing they'd unfold faster.
In his book 4000 Weeks, Oliver Burkeman offers three principles of patience that felt worth sharing:
- Develop a taste for having problems - You'll never complete everything in life. There will always be a new challenge. So, instead of racing to complete things, realize that having problems is what it means to be alive. In work & life, having problems is unavoidable, and that's a good thing.
- Embrace radical incrementalism - This is a point I make all the time: a tiny habit you do daily is more powerful than sporadic large chunks of work. Find something tiny you can do every day (ahem, like a daily blog post) & with patience you'll have a huge body of work.
- Originality lies on the far side of unoriginality - Many people have gone before you. For the first part of your career, hobbies, parenting, or other journeys, you'll be retracing the paths others have trodden. To create a remarkable life, it's not about being original right out of the gate. It's about being patient so that you can be original further down the path, once you'll already followed the footsteps of those who went before.
It can be challenging to communicate clearly about patience. I hope what I've written here makes sense. Patience doesn't mean you're passive. But it does mean you're curious about the life in front of you at this moment. Not constantly thinking and hoping after a future state when all your problems will be solved. That day will never come.
Can you engage with this moment here in front of you & have the patience to see what unfolds next for you? Indeed, the present moment is really all we have.