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Why Are We So Impatient?
What does it mean to have patience? When we think about having patience, really what we’re talking about is not expecting progress or results too soon. The gym example is a great one.
If you don’t have any patience, you will go to the gym for five days and then complain that there’s no progress. If you have patience, you’ll simply go to the gym every day or every other day — whatever your schedule says — and you’ll patiently await the progress to come to you.
Another example is trying to do a better job at work. Let’s say you decide to go in an extra half hour early every morning to get a bit of extra work done. In your mind, this makes you a better employee. But it’s not like you immediately become a CEO once you start doing this! You might not even get noticed for doing it for years!
Even if you’re just doing it Stoically — you’re just doing it as a way to develop your character. Let’s say you want to get up a little bit earlier, you want to have discipline, you want to work hard, etc. It’s not like you’re going to develop this habit in three days. It takes years to develop, really.
Why do we get impatient about this stuff? Why do we get impatient about progress period? Well, really, we want to know if what we are doing is actually working. There’s really only so much time in a day. There’s 24 hours and, if we have goals…
