Developing Active Patience

Hi, I’m David and my mission in life is to prepare people for the future of work.?

In this week’s edition of the newsletter the theme revolves around patience and not just any form of patience, but active patience, the most effective form of patience there is. The world isn't indebted to you. No one is destined to come your way, tap you on the shoulder, and present you with the golden opportunity you've been waiting for. It doesn't work that way. Putting in the work, trying different things, and taking action are the prerequisites of patience. If you’re not taking action, then you’re not practising patience, you’re just waiting for something to happen. Active patience puts you in the best position to get what you want in life, because there’s almost always an action you can take to improve your odds of success. If you go positive and go first, and you do so consistently over time, active patience puts the world on your side and does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Below are some insights and thoughts that will help you understand why you should be active in the moment but patient with the results.?

Timeless Insight

“Patience only works if you do.” – James Clear

Mastery requires patience. However, while the benefits of being patient are well studied, what’s less known is that patience comes in two forms: active and passive. And, only one of them is worth developing. In sports, music, or in life you don’t need to catch every break if you’re willing to keep trying, to keep pushing yourself. Every winner has an archive of losses, but each attempt creates the chance for a victory. Therefore, patience requires action. Patience only works if you do. If active patience would be a formula it would look like this: doing the work + patience. For passive patience the formula is: planning to work + patience. The former requires action, going for results. The latter passivity, waiting for results to come. As you can imagine, the least effective form of patience is passive, which is the form embraced willingly or unwillingly by most people around the world. A person who is passively patient is sitting there waiting for the universe to give them what they think they deserve. Rather than go after the promotion at work, they expect it to fall in their lap. Rather than go after the love of their life, they sit back and expect to be courted. Rather than chase their dreams, they wait for the right opening that seems around the corner but never comes. These people have the wrong form of patience. Here is what they should do instead. Embrace active patience, the most effective form of patience there is. Active patience implies taking significant steps today to set yourself up for future success. It's about strategically preparing for what lies ahead, saving more than you spend and investing wisely, developing the critical skills for future job prospects, and choosing kindness over cleverness.

Food for Thought

People are less patient in different ways as we’ve discussed earlier. Some are passive. Others are active. These two approaches are as different as the results they can provide. Passive patience is waiting for the world to give you the thing you want. This is a poor strategy because it doesn’t align with the way the world works. Active patience is different. Active patience demands action and intention, even while patiently waiting for the results.

Moving from one approach, which will keep you stuck (i.e. passive patience) to the one that will set you free and help you reach your goals (i.e. active patience) is easier said than done. That’s because as with anything in life, the visible progress you're hoping for usually comes slower than you'd like. Even with consistent effort it can take a long time before progress feels significant. So, if you are worried about the immediate results, it’s time to buckle-up.?

It might take a year of writing and editing before your book really starts to come together. Writing this newsletter takes me a few hours every weekend, which is an exercise of patience in itself. You may need two years of recovery from a major injury before you notice just how far you've come. It’s been two years since I had my ACL reconstruction surgery and every time I feel that my knee is not what it used to be I try to reflect on how far I’ve come.?

Successful people tend to possess this rare, and paradoxical, combination of skills that differentiates them from others in that they are both biassed towards action and very patient. Their bias towards action stems from their need to get input from others since actions provide feedback (i.e. information they can use to improve their decision-making). Their patience stems from realising that staying in the game for the longest is the key to winning.?

Naval Ravikant has a great phrase that encapsulates the mindset of successful people: “Impatience with actions, patience with results.” He also underlined that being impatient with actions, doesn’t mean being erratic and sloppy, but rather to first identify which actions have major health, financial, and reputational consequences, and which ones don’t. Then act quickly when it comes to the latter, and do your best to avoid it when it comes to the former.??

When we’re dealing with complex systems and a lot of people, things take time. It takes time for people to get comfortable building trust and working with each other. That’s because relationships compound over time. It takes time for great products to emerge as you continuously iterate. That’s because it takes a lot of iteration to find exactly what product or service works and what doesn’t, and what product or service people are more likely to adopt.

Anything great takes time, and being actively patient is key. You need to be prepared to spend the next 10-20 years in pursuit of whatever you want in life. Whether it’s gaining financial freedom, building a business, becoming an actor or musician. You can’t pretend you can accomplish everything you want in a month, but you also can’t keep track of time. If you do, you’ll likely quit. It just takes too long to constantly think about how long it’s going to take.

What we see now happening in the world with the hype surrounding AI is also a reminder about our lack of patience. Similarly to how we overestimate what we can do in one year, and underestimate what we can do in 10 or 20 years, journalists and tech optimists are all competing in making predictions on how much will generative AI transform our world in the next few years, when it will in fact likely take longer for this transformation to take place.

Ray Amara once said that “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” By developing our active patience we will be more likely to withstand the years of peaks and troughs when it comes to generative AI, while also working tirelessly to make sure that AI systems are aligned with human values. The path ahead is not easy and it will take a lot of active patience to reach our lofty goals.

Article of the Week?

Bill Gates’ Law: How Progress Compounds and Why It Matters

Caricature of the Week

Source: Condé Nast

Thank you for reading and keep on growing!

David

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