All my life I have suffered from the consequences of lack of patience. I want my projects to be finished yesterday and get stressed when I am in a situation where I am unable to work on the projects that I find important, even if the situation is just short and temporary. It also means that when I loose my patience, I risk loosing my motivation as well - it can seem like there is no point in continued efforts if the project will not be finished anytime soon - but that mode of thinking is exactly what causes impatience to decrease your likelihood of success in life. In this article I will explain what I consider to be the anti-impatience mantra : “success comes in chunks”.

After taking a break from updating my blog I checked the statistics today and was amazed by the number of hits while I was gone - even without updates I beat my previous monthly record by more than 100%. This was even more of a surprise to me since I remember thinking before the break that the increase in number of hits was very slow. So even for a dynamic and steadily increasing thing like the monthly number of pages people read on my blog, the real increase is only perceived properly by the human brain if considered as a larger chunk of time.

Even though the objective time it takes for a bowl of water to boil is always the same, subjectively it feels very different when you are just waiting for it to boil compared to when you are engaged in reading a good book and completely forget about the water. It is the same effect Einstein used to describe relativity :

When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours.

Albert Einstein

So from this we can learn that it is important not to trust your own sense of time if you are feeling impatient by a slow process, as your feeling of how long something takes is most probably completely out of proportion to the amount of time one can reasonably expect the process to take. You must remind yourself that success comes in chunks, and that you can only judge time after you have put your best effort into the project and are looking back on a completed part of the project. I guarantee you that most of the time you will think “that was not so bad” when you are finished, so ignoring the “this thing takes forever!” thoughts along the way is the right thing to do.

Not only should you remind yourself that success comes in chunks, you should also put your faith and trust into it. A lot of processes are hidden from sight, and you will only see the result of such a process when it reaches the “tipping point”. The tipping point is when the process is suddenly revealed to you through a surprising event. This is mostly seen within the social context; suddenly you find that your boss have been less than impressed with your work lately and you get fired, or with a positive outcome : all the extra hours you put into the latest project is miraculously rewarded with a promotion. So it becomes very important not to judge the results of your actions prematurely and instead trust that when you put in the effort and do things right, you will be guaranteed a reward at some point. You can not be sure that the reward is exactly what you expect, it might be less or it might be better than what you expected, but when looking at the difference between what you expect and what you get, you will find a valuable clue as to how precisely you have understood the situation. If there is a big difference, take it as a hint that there is a very important lesson to be learned. Every time I write an article for this blog I trust that the nontrivial effort will be worth it in added value for my visitors. I could produce a lot more articles with less effort if I wanted to, but the quality would suffer and I am sure that the overall value of my blog as perceived by my visitors would decrease.

Although I am a firm believer in the saying “You only live once”, those of us with a natural inclination towards impatience should be careful not to take it as an excuse for being impatient. That we only live once should not be taken as “you only live 10 more minutes”, regardless of your age you will most likely have many more years to live, and it is just plain counterproductive only to plan 1 hour,1 month or 1 year ahead. So do not let your desire for consumption trick you into thinking that for example a large credit card debt is a good thing, it may enable you to experience the objects of your desires sooner - but it will always be at a higher total cost as seen during your lifetime.