(A giant clock for remembering that we should be patient – Viña del Mar – Chile)
All throughout life I have always rushed things. I eat pretty fast, try to get done with things fairly fast just so I can get on to the next new thing (this sometimes helps with work but not all the time), but lately I’ve been discovering that having patience is one of the greatest virtues humans can have. In today’s hectic world we want everything immediately, we go to a restaurant and get mad if the food takes more than 10 minutes, we want our Internet searches to appear immediately (most of us forgot what it meant to wait 2 minutes for every page to load on dial up) and so on. Most people have lost their patience, we expect everything to be ready and available whenever we need it that we get easily irritated if we can’t have what we want right away.
Life is not always perfect, actually we are very lucky if we have a long streak of positive things going on in our life. Most good things that could happen in our lives take time to come our way, and the more we wait the more rewarding they are. I’m sure the millionaire who created his money from scratch is way more satisfied than the person who won the lottery. Having a purpose and working hard towards it makes us want to keep improving ourselves.
If you are able to be persistent and keep working hard on any goal you set for yourself it’s just a matter of time and a lot of patience from your end until you accomplish it. The problem with most of us is that once we start working on anything and do not see immediate results we jump onto the next “best” thing and continue on this vicious cycle again. This happens in business, relationships, health and so on. The person who want to lose weight, goes to the gym for 2 weeks, starts a diet and at the end of just 2 weeks drops everything because it is clearly not working, or so they say. If the same person stuck with the gym and diet for 6 months, 1 year and longer they will definitely see results and maybe change their lives forever.
If you combine patience and persistence you can accomplish anything you want in life. You need to understand that most good things take hard work and time to develop. You want to be a millionaire, you then need to work hard and save a lot for a couple of years to get there. Instant gratification feels great but won’t take you where you want to go. It feels great to go down to the shopping mall and spend your hard-earned check, but if you do this every month and do not save, do not expect to suddenly have a retirement account with a sizable amount of money in 20 years.
Cultivate patience in your life, this goes for everything, it makes your life and everyone’s lives around you much easier. If your meeting someone and they are taking 10 minutes longer than expected, take this time to relax, prepare or do whatever you want and don’t get frustrated. Stop wanting everything immediately, have persistence on any goal you set for yourself, add patience to the equation and I guarantee you can find success on anything you set your mind into.
I have never seen someone who goes to the gym regularly for a year or longer in bad shape, never seen someone who saves regularly for years broke, never seen someone who tries hard to make a relationship work unhappy, apply this simple rule in your life and you will be surprised by the many things you can accomplish.
