I'm having trouble with patience

He that can have patience can have what he will.

-Benjamin Franklin

I think I first heard the above quote in college. I was probably feeling impatient like I am now and did a quick Google search for inspiration or something like that.

I internalized it, started applying patience actively in different parts of my life, and I now credit patience for most of the growth that has occurred over the last few years.

But lately, the impatience monster has hit again, and it has come back with a vengeance.

When I was introduced to the quote at the beginning, my life and my aspirations were very different than they are now. I was studying to finish my undergrad at Miami University, I really wanted an internship so that I could get a job in Corporate America, and I figured a pretty regular life would follow from there - work for a bunch of years, have a family sometime along the way, travel on various vacations, and then die (hopefully) many decades later.

My interests outside of school were limited to working out, reading, and hanging out with my friends. All of those were activities over which I largely had control over the results. They were also quite safe.

The past years have changed my perspective drastically though. While at the time of this writing I am still in that corporate job that I was hoping for, my day to day life as well as what I am hoping for from life have evolved.

I want to make stuff, e.g. writing, videos, etc.
I want to take risks instead of taking the “safe” path.
I want to build something that significantly helps the world.

And it is largely because of these new aspirations that I believe my patience is being tested yet again.

With school, I knew that it would be finished in 4 years.

With work, I guessed it would be finished in 40 years.

This new path is one without laid out steps or milestones.

School and work gave me clear metrics to assess how I was doing - things like grades, job titles, and pay.

This new path, thus far, has none of those.

Finally, with both school and work, I had deliverables for which I got pretty instant feedback that I got used to people paying attention to anything that I made.

Steven Pressfield talks about this in his book, Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t.

Sometimes young writers acquire the idea from their years in school that the world is waiting to read what they’ve written. They get this idea because their teachers had to read their essays or term papers or dissertations. In the real world, no one is waiting to read what you’ve written.

That was me. That was totally me. Once I started writing or podcasting or taking pictures or making videos or any other creative endeavor, I had that feeling where I was expecting others to pay attention. I was expecting them to care.

But the reality is that they haven’t yet and that is the largest source of my impatience.

Quick Pause

This is definitely not meant to be a pity party. There are a few things that I know to be true at this moment:

I am still very much at the beginning stage. It hasn’t even been a year of really dedicating significant time to making anything. What’s the rush?
I still have not created things that are of value to others for them to stop and pay attention. I haven’t earned the attention of others, if that is even a thing to be earned. Instead of thinking about the metrics, it is more effective to focus on simply making better stuff.

Un-Pause

Enough with the problem, it is time for a solution. Instead of feeling sorry for myself and labeling myself a victim, what have I been doing to deal with this impatience?

I have gone seeking perspective.

Perspective 1: My stuff isn’t even good yet.

I say this with complete honesty. The more that I create, the more that I realize how bad it is.

It’s rather funny because I remember when I started, I thought I was creating such amazing stuff.

In order improve though, I’ll keep making the bad stuff, hopefully improve a bit with each one, and then eventually get to a place where the things I make are worthy of consumption.

All that to say: Why am I in such a rush for people to see my bad stuff? With time will come improvement as well as some eyeballs. Or at least that is the hope.

Perspective 2: Stop focusing so much on the short term.

I aim to focus on whatever the current task is to make it the best I possibly can. But I have also been reminding myself that each one is only one piece of a larger puzzle.

This exercise has helped me immensely.

I start with my current goals for consistent creating.

1 Museletter a week
2 YouTube video a week (very much working on this 😅)
2 Blog posts a week
1 Gratitude Tweet a day

Then, I expand those over the course of a year, assuming that I do them consistently. After some advanced calculations (🤓🤣), I found the totals would be:

52 Museletters
104 YouTube videos
104 Blog posts
365 Gratitude Tweets

Seeing those, I realized how many more opportunities there were than I had thought before. When focused only on individual items, I got overwhelmed. When seeing them as a (potential) collective group, I found some peace.

Perspective 3: It is (hopefully) a long life.

As of the time of this writing, there are 63 years, 1 month, and 22 days until my 90th birthday, if I am so lucky as to live that long (shout-out to the app, Life: Just one, for those stats).

That’s a lot of years.

Obviously, it is more than I have lived so far.

This was the single-most important exercise that brought patience back to my life.