Why is Patience Hard?

By Rajesh Setty on Sun 10 Aug 2008, 9:15 AM – 8 Comments

Seth talked about “the secret of the web” being Patience. I loved the post and am in total agreement with Seth. In fact, I think Patience is one the key secrets of life.

Things always take longer, cost more and are more complicated then you originally imagined. Without patience, it’s so easy to give up.

The question therefore is “Why is patience difficult to practice?”

There is no easy answer to it but I want to try to answer it.

The Reasons:

I can think of at least three reasons:

The first reason I think of is that there is hunger for speed in the marketplace. The companies are always coming up with faster, better and cheaper ways of doing things. The value proposition for most companies are that there is a “better” (faster) way of doing something that you are already doing.

LinkedIn will say they have a faster way of networking with people.

Twitter will say they have a faster way of communicating with people.

Webex will say they have a faster way of meeting with people.

I can go on – but the point is that speed is now in our backgrounds.

The second reason is that media loves to highlight exceptions. What comes in the media has to be exceptions. Why would you want to feature something that is normal.

So the VERY small percentage of people who achieved overnight success (if there is ever anything like that) are the ones that get featured in the media. Since there is so much of media around, one can easily get carried away thinking what is on the media is the reality.

The third reason is the practicing patience means paying a bigger price for a longer time. In other words, you can’t cut a “deal” with life to get something quick. However, if you look anywhere, you will see that “everything is on sale” somewhere. Bargain hunting is the norm. Patience means – no bargain hunting

Personal Experience:

I am fortunate that I learnt the practice of patience early in life. I was sort of forced into it. May be. I wrote my first book when I was ten years old. For those who are curious, it was fiction and it was in my language Kannada. The title says “Mr X..Killer” and it was a murder mystery. My name on the book is “C.P. Rajesh” – that was the name under which all first six books were published.

Took me about six months to write it. After that, I thought writing the book must be the most difficult part and publishing it must be easy. After all, how long would it take to typeset and print it. People have done it before and my book is one more. All I have to do is to reach out to one of the publishers and just let them know that this book is now available for publishing. And, they would jump on it

If there was a height of “being naive”, that was it.

So there started my journey – to find a publisher. Soon I realize that it may not be as easy as I thought. But by the time I realized that I had already been rejected about fifty times. in fact, by that time I was getting VERY used to being rejected. I was never comfortable with it but was getting used to it.

Long story short – it took me a couple of years more (when I was thirteen) and probably about 160 rejections, that one of the publishers said that he is going to publish the book and asked me “How much are you expecting?”. I almost fell out of my chair. Not being rejected was new to me.

That whole experience was a long lesson in patience for me. It was a big price to pay but I am really glad that I paid it early in my life.

Have a great week ahead and THANK YOU Seth for reminding this.

Related Articles:

• The Power of Patience – Take Two
• Addicted to Newton’s Third Law
• Quotes worth recording – Dee Hock
• What is hard for your competition to copy?

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