Patience
one day my phone rang and on the other end was a 29-year-old woman—I’ll call her Leanne—standing on the streets of San Francisco, with a business plan for a new company in her purse. She’d heard about my coaching from another Silicon Valley entrepreneur who thought I could be helpful, she said, but she was working on a tight timeline and wanted to know if I was available immediately.
“Everyone out here has a company by the time they turn thirty, and I’m turning thirty in a few months,” she told me. “I have an idea for a Web business that I feel certain will be successful, but I keep coming up with reasons not to pursue it. And if I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it.”
After getting more background on Leanne’s idea and her motivation for going in this direction, I decided to work with her. She was passionate about the value she knew she could bring to others with her innovative approach, and she knew that if she were accountable to me to take the necessary risks and follow through on her goals, she’d succeed—and, boy, did she. Leanne filed papers to incorporate her business the day before she turned thirty, and within a year was featured on design shows, in entrepreneur magazines, and even on the stage at an international economic summit.
Leanne’s impatience to succeed at an age when many young adults in generations past used to wonder what they would be when they grew up isn’t uncommon any longer, particularly in a part of the country where people have been known to sell their first company for several million dollars before even getting a college degree. Although a certain amount of impatience can be useful when it comes to setting a deadline about moving forward—like Leanne had with her thirtieth birthday—it can also be hazardous if the person is overly eager to attain the wrong things and lacks the ability to delay gratification in the areas that do matter in gritty goal pursuit. As one Chinese proverb says, “One moment of patience may ward off great disaster. One moment of impatience may ruin a whole life.”
“Freaking out” about Einstein
People with authentic grit cultivate the virtue of patience because they don’t set short-term goals; their ambitions are long term and are rarely, if ever, achieved in a few months. Take the example of the team of scientists who spent the better part of their careers trying to prove the last portion of Einstein’s theory of relativity on the existence of gravitational waves. In September 2015, one hundred years after Einstein’s work made its debut, a few scientists discovered that two black holes had collided in space one billion light years away, creating a faint chirp on a machine designed to pick up these very frequencies, the most sensitive scientific instrument ever built.
When the announcement of this stunning breakthrough was broadcast from the California Institute of Technology on February 11, 2016, the leaders who had spearheaded this quest at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory were well past traditional retirement age: one man was in his seventies, while the other two were in their eighties, one suffering from dementia.
People who understood the significance were agog. “I think this will be one of the major breakthroughs in physics for a long time,” said Szabolcs Marka, a Columbia University professor who was working on the project. Others who heard of the results or read about them in the paper when it was announced alternately described themselves as having “goose bumps” or “freaking out.”1
Tell that emoji to get me a pizza now!
The idea of devoting one’s life to attempting to solve a scientific theory, a road sure to be filled with discouragement, delay, and possible failure, is a hard sell these days when immediate gratification is the norm. Leanne’s generation grew up with instantaneous access to all kinds of things, an ease of attainability that make it difficult to know how to wait for anything. If you seek an answer, ask your smartphone. Don’t want to stand in line at a restaurant, buy your own coffee, wash your clothes, or even shop for groceries? Apps and services like TaskRabbit and Nowait make it easy to delegate anything that might involve personal discomfort or unnecessary delay. It’s even possible to get a pizza delivered to you without using your vocal chords or standing up: just send a text of a pizza emoji to the Domino’s Pizza website. Patrick Doyle, the CEO of the company who oversaw the launch of this service, notes, “It’s the epitome of convenience . . . we’ve got this down to a five-second exchange.”2
The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has noted that the “hyperconnected” lives of adults under the age of thirty-five comes with significant downsides, reporting that “Negative effects include a need for instant gratification and loss of patience.”3 One study found that tolerance for simply starting up a video had plummeted; after two seconds, people stop waiting, and after thirty seconds, 80 percent of computer users abandon the effort altogether. “Our expectation of ‘instant’ has become faster,” one researcher said, adding that one of his studies had found that those forced to wait for a download who were put on hold at a call center simply hung up rather than wait for service.4
The search for immediacy is having an impact on activities that always brought pleasure and rewards but that now feel so effortful that participation is lagging. Quick fun through apps like Candy Crush Saga is trumping the desire to read books. Americans are also saving less money than ever, dropping from 9.7 percent of disposable income being saved in 1982 to 3.6 percent in 2012. “We’re not wired to think about the long-term anymore,” says Phil Fremont-Smith of ImpulseSave, a company whose app tracks spending and sends congratulatory messages when members cut costs.5
The bestselling book on productivity, The 4-Hour Workweek, popularized the idea that we should never spend time on anything that isn’t our “genius work” and that delegating tasks and unpleasant chores that could be done more easily and economically by others is superior because we’ll get more done, get richer, and have more leisure time.6 This encouragement gave rise to websites like Upwork and Elance, which outsource projects like PowerPoint creation, accounting, writing, and most anything else you can think of, making it easier to accomplish things in the minimum amount of time. In fact, I can’t think of an entrepreneur or CEO I have worked with who didn’t use these types of services when they were in a pinch and needed immediate help getting a job out the door.
Although I’ve seen a certain type of impatience be a positive spur to action—as with Leanne and other clients of mine who know that their time is better spent on things they cannot outsource or delegate—our culture now prods us to believe that we should never have to wait for anything or do hard things because someone else can do it for us. If you don’t believe me, check out the Yellow Pages, commercials, or business signs in your community. Don’t you want to patronize a Qwicky Kleen car detailer, an EZ Loan Center, or a Sir Speedy Copy Service? How can you resist promises like In-N-Out Burger and Three Minute Therapy? Would anything sell with names like Math Made Hard, U Wait Here, or Not Fast Food?
Does anyone long for anything anymore?
I was having lunch in downtown Washington, DC, one afternoon and talking with a colleague about the research on people’s current inability to be patient and the fact that the average human attention span is one second less than that of a goldfish (seven seconds and eight seconds, respectively), when she suddenly got a faraway look in her eyes and told me a story that got to the heart of what a difference patience can make in a person’s life.
“When I was in second grade, I asked my parents for an expensive doll that I saw at my favorite toy store,” she recounted. “They told me that if I saved my money, I could get it before the year was over. So I did as many chores as I could, and I saved my allowance for six months until I finally had earned enough to get that doll. I went to the store with my mother, and I can still remember how excited I was to open my change purse and give the storeowner the money I’d earned all by myself. I was so proud, and I think I loved that doll even more than I would have if my parents had bought it for me when I first asked for it.”
As she spoke, I thought about the mistakes I’d made repeatedly with my own children when they were growing up, how I’d often given in to their requests to buy a set of Legos, a snack, or a game, without making them earn their own money or wait until a later date. Some of this had happened because I was lazy and just wanted their whining or fighting to end; other times, I wanted to see them be happy—even though the satisfaction of getting the item didn’t last more than a few hours or days. I know that their occasional impatience for a quick fix in later years wasn’t just because of proliferating technology and the shortcuts society encourages; it was also because I hadn’t sat through the discomfort of seeing them be unhappy when I knew I could make it go away by opening my wallet.
When we teach children to have patience and to wait for what they want, we give them stock that pays valuable dividends for decades. Learning to anticipate a future event—like saving for an iPhone or a trip—has been found to create a sense of optimism and longing that results in more satisfaction with the item when it’s acquired. Shoppers even report that they are more dissatisfied with their purchases if they didn’t have to work hard to get it—whether it’s a cake that took only two steps to bake instead of five, or a lamp bought online with two quick clicks.
Well-behaved “bébés” and American brats
It doesn’t just add value to wait for something. Succumbing to instant gratification makes it impossible to learn how to sit with uncomfortable feelings, which eventually pass, a lesson we’re supposed to start teaching our children when they’re infants with the Ferber method. By gradually tapering off the number of times they visit fussy children having trouble falling asleep, parents were counseled to use this approach, popularized in the mid-1980s, so that their children would learn to self-soothe. French parents are mystified by the difficulties American parents have with this and other daily challenges, such as allowing children to interrupt phone conversations and dictate mealtimes. Pamela Druckerman writes in Bringing Up Bébé, a book about French parenting practices, that French parents are often incredulous that American children can “n’importe quoi” or “do whatever they like.”7 Dr. Leonard Sax, the author of The Collapse of Parenting, says that parents who fail to help their children restrain themselves and learn deference to adults and rules contribute to a “brattiness” that undermines the ability to be patient.8
Patience with one’s feelings and the understanding that difficulties pass—and may even result in better long-term outcomes in unexpected areas—is especially challenging among today’s adolescents and young adults. Suicides have increased in recent years, which many psychologists attribute to the instant gratification and quick fixes that have become commonplace and lead some to believe their sad feelings are permanent.9 Just a few months after I spoke to middle school students in Murphy, Texas, one of their school psychologists lamented the suicides of two senior girls in Plano, Texas, who had attended Murphy. She thought that they would have benefitted from hearing my talk and learning about patience and how it can build the grit to withstand difficult times.10
Cultivating patience is harder for some children than others. I was first diagnosed with ADHD as a young girl, which was partly why it was so easy for me to tumble into the addiction of bulimia in my teen years. Bulimia presents the almost-magical promise of getting away with eating anything you want without paying the price—except that “almost-magical fixes” always come with some kind of price that costs more than you bargain for. I ultimately had to learn how to cultivate patience to sit with hunger and emotions in order to overcome my eating disorder and tame my natural impulsiveness. So I know it is possible to override the wiring for immediate gratification if you have a goal pulling you forward. In my case, I wanted to be a thriving, healthy woman who wasn’t ruled by food, and I did whatever I needed to do on a daily basis to avoid binging and purging or doing something else self-destructive. I later discovered that many of the things that helped me with this task and that led me into thirty years of unbroken recovery are now upheld by research. Living in twenty-four-hour compartments instead of looking for long-term results overnight, being in a community where the desired behavior is the norm, and cultivating gratitude—these are all steps proven to build patience.
TiVo, news crawls, and binge watching
I had the benefit of starting my recovery in the mid-1980s, before the onslaught of personal technology that makes any kind of prolonged effort and concentration difficult. Now, our culture is so wired for instant stimulation that anyone who is trying to cultivate grit in themselves, or their children, is up against daunting challenges. Just take television, for example. News shows now feature “a crawl” of other happenings along the bottom or side of the screen so that we always know what has been discussed, what is being discussed now, and what will be discussed in the next few minutes. And if you don’t like what you’re watching, your remote control will take you with lightning speed to hundreds of other channels. If you have a TiVo service, you can fast-forward through the recorded commercials and watch only the show itself. And what if you can’t wait the millisecond it takes to change a channel to see if your baseball team is winning? Then you can take advantage of the picture-in-picture feature, which allows you to keep a small screen of another channel open on the main screen so that you can watch two shows at once. Finally, you now don’t even have to wait for a favorite show to unfold over a season in order to see how a character develops or a plot line unfolds. Netflix routinely dumps an entire season of shows like House of Cards onto its service all at once—which has led to conditions jokingly called unseasonal affective disorder and post-binge malaise. Like the food binges I once indulged in that left me with remorse and a hangover, the 61 percent of people who confess to watching multiple episodes, or even an entire season, in one sitting later report sadness, emptiness, and a lack of meaningful purpose.11
If it’s not the television fostering our impatience, try getting on the telephone. If we call the electric company, we are put on hold with music, advertisements, and a running commentary about the wait itself. When we log in to our email, we are bombarded with messages requesting instant replies, and when we shop online, websites are programmed to create a false sense of urgency, with frequent prompts like “You have five minutes to complete your purchase,” “Only two left in stock,” or “Sale ends at midnight.” Like trained seals, we often do what we’re told: we answer that email, respond to that text, and buy that purple spatula, which gives us a false sense of productivity, when in fact all we’ve done is react to what was in front of us.
Play ball, but do it fast!
It’s often said that sports teach character, but it has become harder to learn the virtue of patience there, too. In a global effort to engage younger viewers and participants, sports as diverse as cricket, volleyball, baseball, football, golf, and Formula 1 racing have all found ways to shorten the time needed to watch or play. For example, volleyball players, who are accustomed to celebrating or commiserating every point, which can add fifteen to thirty minutes to a match, are now discouraged from such action.12 Baseball players cannot move out of the batter’s box once they are at the plate, and golfers are now on the clock and penalized for slow play. The world’s number-one-ranked golfer, Rory McIlroy, lamented recently that the plummeting interest and participation in golf in England is because “Everything’s so instant now, and everyone doesn’t have as much time as they used to.”13
The NCAA Basketball Championship in April 2015 epitomized the changes that have occurred with patience in athletics and how these changes have impacted teamwork and success. The game that spring featured the University of Wisconsin-Madison, headed by coach Bo Ryan, who is known for building a team and cultivating great players over four years, and Duke University, headed by coach Mike Krzyzewski, whose teams are largely populated by “one and done” freshmen who play for one year before leaving for the National Basketball Association draft. That year, Duke won—a victory that showed why going for individual results and a big payday can be more appealing than working for several years to be part of a greater whole.14
“Pencils down” and fast partnership tracks
You don’t always have to cultivate patience in the workplace, either. Big changes have been announced on Wall Street and with major banks to keep Millennials from straying after two or three years. Traditionally, the track to becoming a partner involved years of grunt work and hundred-hour workweeks before getting the multi-million-dollar payday, but Millennials don’t want to wait, and don’t feel the need to compromise family time to achieve their goals. As a result, Citigroup announced in 2016 that it wasn’t just planning to help young employees get promoted more quickly, it was also offering a gap year to new hires during which they could work on charitable projects for a smaller salary. JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced a “Pencils Down” initiative allowing bankers to take weekends off. And Goldman Sachs is rejiggering entry-level banking jobs so that less time is spent on spreadsheets and pitch books in favor of more novel work.15
While no one would argue that hundred-hour workweeks are appealing or that wanting your job to be more meaningful than boring is bad, the Millennial generation’s impatience to get closer to their desired prize a lot sooner and a lot more easily than their parents did is galling to some who feel that this catering is only making problems worse. Some of the Silicon Valley companies that became legendary for removing all nuisances from their young employees’ lives—such as standing in line at a barber shop, going to the dry cleaners, and even walking their dogs—are now cutting back on these perks for two reasons: (1) employees begin to take their pampered lives for granted and request more benefits (in an extreme case of not wanting to wait for pleasure, one Silicon Valley startup employee requested that a zip-line be installed from his workplace to the closest bar), and (2) the perks cost too much money.16
So what are we supposed to do if patience is in short supply and the cultural triggers around us aren’t making it easy to get it? There are glimmers of hope that people want to change, and research is providing clues as well about where we can start to make a difference.
Bayard’s story
In the summer of 2015, my youngest child, Bayard, asked me to do something unusual: take him to the phone store to exchange his smartphone for an old-fashioned flip phone. “I’m addicted to this thing,” he said, holding it up in resignation. “If I’m not doing something, I look at it to entertain myself, and I’m sick of it. I want to go back to simplicity.”
The young man who waited on us at the phone store couldn’t believe it when we got there and explained our request. “You are the first person I’ve ever met who has asked for this,” he said to my son, his eyes open in wonderment. “Are you sure?”
Two years later, Bayard is by his own account a different person because of the switch. Although he initially missed the convenience of some of the apps, which allowed him to follow the Washington Nationals or request money from his parents, Bayard says that his newfound freedom from the compulsion to check his phone to see if anyone liked his Instagram post, for example, has made him happier. “I always felt like I was missing out if I wasn’t on my phone, but going without it shows me that you really don’t miss much,” he tells me. He says that he can focus without distraction for longer periods of time, and, most surprisingly, that he enjoys going to baseball games even more now. “I look around between innings and pitching changes, and I can actually observe what’s going on and relax instead of staring at my phone,” Bayard says.
Although I know most people wouldn’t do what Bayard has done, I also know that more and more people are deciding to voluntarily reduce their reliance on constant entertainment and are cultivating patience instead. My daughter, Samantha, was the first to tell me that college students are stacking their phones up at meals in an effort to pay more attention to each other instead of their phones. The first person to grab their phone, apparently, is stuck with the bill for the whole table, which is a powerful motivator to reduce impulsiveness.
I’ve also found a number of young adults who aspire to careers that won’t result in immediate financial gains or instant fame, which gives me hope. I first learned about Nick McGreivy, a classmate of Bayard’s, through his mom, Katherine, who came to an event where I was speaking about Creating Your Best Life. Afterward, Katherine asked me how to handle Nick’s obsession with basketball and his desire to make the middle school team, which she felt might be an unrealistic goal because of Nick’s late start in the game and his shorter height. “Am I harming him by encouraging him?” she worried. “Could he have too much grit in a bad way?”
Although he wasn’t a natural, Nick’s work ethic and disciplined practice ultimately resulted in his making the team. That same focus and mental toughness are what he had to rely on when his charismatic and brilliant father, a physician, died unexpectedly at the end of Nick’s high school freshman year. Katherine was left a young widow with four boys, Nick being the oldest.
When I caught up with Nick years later when he was a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, his life was still a study in grit, goal-setting, and future-mindedness. After teaching himself to high-jump in his senior year of high school, he’d made it to the state meet and been recruited by Penn’s coach, who allowed him to walk on to the team. His freshman season didn’t go as expected, so Nick was cut. Proud of his efforts, nonetheless, Nick decided to tackle organizing a club basketball team, which ran into a number of obstacles, all of which he patiently overcame, one by one. And it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Nick hired a jumping coach and worked assiduously in the summer before his senior year to try out again for the Penn team; he jumped a personal best and made the team.
Nick’s excitement about working during one summer at Princeton University in their Plasma Physics Laboratory to study nuclear fusion makes sense when you take stock of authentic grit. “A lot of people are cynical about it because it’s so hard, but I’m not dissuaded at all that this might not be solved in my lifetime. I think it’s really exciting,” he says. Like the octogenarians at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, who spent half of their lives working on Einstein’s gravitational waves, Nick has the grit to be in a challenging field solving the hardest of puzzles, something that could never come to those who don’t have the patience to work on history-making challenges.17
EXERCISE Ways to cultivate patience
• Play chess. Board games, particularly games of skill and planning like chess, teach a number of valuable skills, including pattern recognition and patience. Chess yields many positive attributes, such as the need to focus deeply, the ability to visualize the impact a move will have on the future, the patience to wait as a final outcome deliberately and slowly unfolds, and the attention to detail that can make all the difference between winning and losing. Chess is an exercise in planning and patience, honing abilities that are also needed to map out the actions you will need to take to accomplish your long-term life goals.18 The ability to “focus” and do “deep work” has been described as “the IQ of the 21st century” by Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, who says that adults who can focus will be the most prized individuals in coming years.19
• Plant a garden. You cannot rush the unfolding of a tulip or the ripening of a tomato. Planting a garden and tending to it in the hope that you will be rewarded for your efforts and conscientiousness with beauty and nourishment is one of the time-hallowed ways to learn patience. Dan Buettner, the author of Blue Zones and Thrive, notes that almost all of the happiest, longest-lived populations in the world have gardens they tend to daily—gardens that produce food and herbs for their healthy meals.20 The rewards of being in nature and using our hands are also well-known to therapists. Studies show that as little as twenty minutes in nature produces hours of vitality and that using our hands to create something is a sure mood-lifter.21
• Wait in line. An op-ed piece I read in the New York Times pointed to an uptick in the “waiting culture” in some cities, where they have resisted the idea of making it easy to attain something. Several “hot” restaurants that have garnered national attention refuse to take reservations, resulting in multi-hour lines to get a coveted table. Naturally, the fact that you cannot do anything to improve your chances of getting in, other than simply standing in line, gives the restaurants a certain type of cachet and value. If it’s worth waiting for, it must be good! The author of this piece also sagely observed that not all waiting is created equal: “Choosing lines wisely, interpreting them, and learning how to enjoy them may be the next skills American consumers everywhere will need to master.”22
• Choose to choose in a few weeks. A unique piece of research on waiting to make a decision—not just waiting in line—found something intriguing. When you decide to defer making a decision until you have slept on it—sometimes for many nights—you learn that patience in making a decision leads to valuing patience itself, and even deciding that long-term rewards are better than short-term payoffs. “People tend to value things more in the present and discount their worth in the future,” Ayelet Fishbach, the study author says. “But my research suggests that making people wait to make a decision can improve their patience because the process of waiting makes the reward for waiting seem more valuable.”23
• Practice gratitude. Research on how to curb poor economic decision-making, also called temporal discounting, found that subjects who wrote autobiographical essays describing situations that evoke gratitude were more likely to delay taking an immediate financial reward in favor of a larger one in the future. The novel part of this research is that the study’s authors controlled for the emotion of happiness and found that it didn’t have the same impact on temporal discounting as gratitude did.
EXERCISE The insight is in the details
Gritty people have to be patient because it takes time for all of the different parts of their goal pursuit to come together. When you have to wait years for the fruits of your labor to pay off, finding joy in small events and savoring them will boost your well-being and sustain your passion, while fine-tuning your ability to extract the best from every detail. The following exercise is based on an assignment Jennifer Roberts, Harvard’s Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, uses with her students. It will reward you with a better ability to cultivate patience and to slow down long enough to find the valuable gems in life’s details.24
Spend thirty minutes observing something without interruption. Take notes about what you see and how it makes you feel. Notice any sensory changes in your body while you observe and contemplate. Take your time. Be slow and deliberate as you gaze, and move on to the next frame of observation only when you feel saturated with the presence of the aspect you focused on previously. Does the object of your attention evoke any similarities to other objects? Do you smell or hear anything that alters your perception? At the end of thirty minutes, write about how the slow process of appraisal is different from a quick look at the same object. Are you aware of any specific differences that make the longer process more valuable or enriching?