No B.S Friday: There are two types of patience, but only one leads to success.
Patience isn’t always a virtue.
Waiting in line at Hungry Jacks? Yes. Patience is a virtue then, thank you.
But waiting for the world to stop jerking you around and to sort you out financially? No. Patience isn’t a virtue then at all.
I find it useful to distinguish between what I call “passive patience” and “active patience.”
I think a lot of people get hooked on passive patience. It’s Cinderella patience.
It’s that ability to stick out a crap situation – to just hold on and hope that your fairy god-mother comes along at some point.
It’s swallowing your pride and settling into a job you hate.
It’s letting your in-laws boss you around because surely they’ll have to come around eventually, right?
Or it’s just fighting that whimpering voice inside of you that says “there must be more than this,” as you go off to slog your way through another 8-hr shift on the customer service front desk.
Passive patience is passive, but it also takes work. You have to fight yourself. You have to swallow your anger and your pride, until it lives in your belly as constipation or cancer.
You have to deny your inner child. You have to deny your dreams. You have to deny that painfully obvious reality that we, as humans, are just capable of so much more than this.
But we do it. We get it done. We have a phenomenal ability to spend decades in a world drained of all its colour.
But we do it.
But passive patience is toxic patience. Remember that.
Active patience on the other hand is profoundly healthy and powerful.
Active patience is the ability to recognise that most things worth having require some form of sacrifice and hard work.
And so active patience is that ability to keep your head down and to keep chipping away at your goals, week in, week out, edging closer day after day.
It’s the kind of patience that keeps you to your diet, even though the needle on the scale hasn’t moved since yesterday.
It’s the patience that holds your child through their tantrums, knowing that loving attention will be better for them in the long run than flushing their head in the toilet, as much as you want to do that right now.
And it’s the patience that holds you through self-education, into your first deal that makes a modest profit of $10K, and the next one that makes $30K, until finally you’re ready to do that deal that finally helps you quit work for good.
That’s the patience that can move mountains.
So yes, patience can be a virtue.
But it can also be toxic and soul-destroying.
So I ask you… are you being patient?
Are you being the right kind of patient?
JG.