The worst type of patience is simply waiting around

Nothing good comes from rushing something. We can be talking about a training program, a business, a relationship or even something smoking on a barbecue. Good things take time and once we learn to embrace that undeniable fact of life, this is where success will be more likely. Today’s goal is not to talk about success itself but the component we (talking to myself here) struggle the most with: patience.

Patience is crucial if we want to be successful because it allows things to develop organically and allows the compounding effect to happen. Those little everyday efforts will add up one day and that’s where we will finally reach our goal. Ok, that was a pretty simplistic approach to success: Repeat, repeat and repeat until you find success. Correct, but in the world we are living in, where we can find anything we want by taking our phones out of our pockets and have the answer in less than 10 seconds, waiting for “the thing” to happen can be and is actually really hard. Here’s the catch and what this post is all about, we actually don’t have to sit and wait, we have to actively wait for “the thing” to happen. That means that being passive will never get us to where we want to go, we have to be actively patient. Let’s break it down:

If you're passively patient, you're just sitting there, expecting good things to come your way without doing much. Even if you wait for a long time, you won't see much progress. This kind of patience goes against the idea that every action has a reaction, like Newton's third law.

No action means no results.

You can't count on the world to give you things, and nobody is guaranteed to show up and hand you great opportunities. Life doesn't work like that. These opportunities have to catch you at work so that you can notice them and take advantage.

This is why the best type of patience is active patience.

Active patience means you take real steps now to make your future better. It's about getting ready for what's coming next—saving more money than you spend, making smart investments, learning the skills that will help you in your future job, choosing to be kind, and so on. It’s a sweet and difficult balance of trusting, even blindly sometimes, that your actions are going to take you where you want to be. But there has to be actions. 

Here's the important lesson: Active patience makes the world more likely to help you out. If you stay positive and take the first step, and you keep doing that, the world will start to support you more.

Stay active!