Why Is Patience Important For Success?
I’m sure you’ve heard of the saying, “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” or “patience is a virtue.” On a theoretical level, you understand this, and I understand this. But when you’re ambitious, it’s hard to actually practice patience.
As hard as it is, if you want to be successful, patience is critical. Think of all the successful people you know today - Warren Buffet, Jack Ma, and Oprah Winfrey… They didn’t build their empire overnight. It took them years to become who they are today.
I believe patience is correlated to success for three main reasons:
1. Patience Builds Grit
Whether you’re running an enterprise or a small business, there will be times when you run into frustrating obstacles. And without patience, frustration can become the root that drives you to quit what you’re doing. You become unable to improve your business in a dedicated manner and you’re more likely to quit and start over just because things didn’t go your way the first time. And when this becomes a pattern, you’ll never be able to build the empire you want.
On the other hand, if you understand that building great things takes time, and actually apply this philosophy into whatever you do - you’re more likely to stay calm and overcome frustration, allowing yourself to reach your end goal.
2. Patience Gives Hope
Believe it or not, patience actually helps you stay hopeful. When you have hope, you build natural resilience towards obstacles because you believe that what you do will eventually have a good outcome. It’s like climbing up a mountain. You know there’s a peak, and you know you’re going to reach it if you keep going. Even if you don’t see the top right now, you know if you stay patient and keep going, you’ll reach it eventually.
3. Patience Strengthens Relationships
As you drive down the highway to success, it’s inevitable that you’ll have to build relationships with people and invest in people - whether they are your customers, employees, or colleagues. But people aren’t perfect. Just like you, they will make mistakes along the way. They may even slow you down. And this is why being patient is important. Relationships are strengthened through patience, It brings people together while solving a common problem or reaching a common goal. On the other hand, impatience tends to create friction within a relationship, causing you to give up on people easily just because of one hiccup. I’m not saying you should allow people to take advantage of you. What I’m trying to emphasize is that building relationships takes time, investing in people takes time, and you need these relationships to fuel you as you drive down the highway to success.
Living in a “convenience society” makes practicing patience difficult. For example, being able to get instant delivery on our food through food delivery apps, or being able to shop online to instantly purchase what we need. The constant stimulation and instant reward, items, and services we get from the development of modern-day technology has created a culture of instant gratification. Even if we understand patience as a concept, it’s hard to apply it naturally in our day-to-day lives. So to develop patience, you have to actively practice it and create a habit out of it.
Patience is a critical requirement for reaching any goal because most things can’t be rushed. Some things simply take more than effort and hard work - they also require long-term commitments. And if you want to build your “Rome”, you have to be patient in the macro while consistently taking action in the micro.