The Virtue of Patience and the 10000 Hour Rule

Patience is an underrated virtue. In our age, everything seems to be within reach. As a consequence, we live in a time of hyperactivity and continuous tantalising. And yet, as Maria Popova points out in her marvellous blog 10Learnings from 10 Years of Brain Pickings, “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” What could be really worthwhile? I would consider education, acquiring knowledge and skills, but also: good human relationships and peace.

Concerning education and the acquisition of knowledge and skills, many students and young graduates suffer from a lack of patience rather than a lack of talent. Malcolm Gladwell mentions in his book  Outliers the 10,000 hour rule: you need to collect around 10,000 hours of practice if you really want to be good at something. The rule is certainly valid for hardware and software developers, but also for practitioners of the higher arts like musicians and painters.

There are two serious issues with patience. The first one is that not all stakeholders may show the same patience for the same purpose. As a result, your project can be cancelled, not because you didn’t have enough patience, but rather because someone else didn’t have enough patience (e.g. your teacher or your manager). This is also the case in peace negotiations: if one party doesn’t have enough patience, the peace process stops and war restarts. War is always a consequence of a lack of patience.

A second serious issue with patience is that you can’t really possess it. It is not a permanent character trait or virtue. You don’t have patience, you practice it in given circumstances for a given purpose. One moment of weakness, a moment of impatience, can jeopardise an entire project or venture. One can also be very patient in reaching one goal and very impatient in reaching another goal.  

The good news about patience is that it can bring us to things of real value. To reach a such a ‘higher’ goal, we will always need dedicated time and we will need to overcome anxieties. To overcome the time, we need patience; to overcome the anxieties, we need courage. Patience and courage go well together in any achievement we aim for. And in essence, our admiration for people is essentially based on virtues like patience and courage, not on achievements. The actual achievements will be surpassed by newcomers, but the virtues will remain. 

I refer to my earlier blogs: "Ode to Industry","Virtues and Virtutes" and "You are your time"