Pursuing or waiting on my dream: which one is Patience?
The conditions were same for both of them. What really made the difference?
Ken and Doni were the two sons of a dying man who gave them one coconut each. Their father had laboured all his life on the farms to be able to raise enough money to purchase these rare coconut seedlings.
As his time drew hear, he called his two sons into his barn and told them the potentials of the seeds he had given them after which he told them to do with his barn whatever they will. And not after long, he died.
So Ken and Doni planted their seeds and after few years the trees were ready to bear fruits. Ken who discovered a market for coconut sugar quickly started tapping his coconut tree. The market was good and the profits were coming in.
However, Doni had other plans for his coconut🥥 tree. He wanted more trees; a coconut plantation but there was one hiccup: in order to achieve that, he'll have to invest years working on his farm and going without profits. With patience he worked for the first half decade on his farm selling half of his coconut fruits and replanting the other half to increase his farm.
While Ken made profits from tapping his coconut tree, Doni invested years in order to multiply his profits once he enters the market.
Nearly two decades went by and Ken could no longer meet up with the demand of his clients because his tree could no longer produce much so he had to meet Doni, who already had multiple coconut trees being tapped, to work out a solution.
Doni readily supplied and even leased him a few trees to tap and return revenues thus making Ken his employee.
It has often been said that patience is a virtue but if you look around carefully you'll see people who were patient enough but never made anything out of life. This begs the question "Is patience really a virtue? Or is it enough to be patient?"
The uncertainty surrounding this supposed virtue has made people to resort to cashing out on opportunities and things that could have yielded more in a week, month, year or just a few years when waiting a little longer would have been most beneficial. When I say "yield" I do not just refer to monetary value, I'm talking about relationships, time invested in learning a skill or trade, or building something novel. What if there's a way we can be more certain that being patient, the process will pay off? What if we can be certain that we'll have more to gain at the end of the day? Would you not want that?
Here I'm sharing a few things you can combine with being patient with yourself and the process to increase the chances of getting the desired results.
Firstly, the need for patience comes as a result of other available alternatives. I mean you don't need patience if what you need it for is your only option. However, life at it's least, is binary. That means there's always an option other than what you need patience for. This, therefore, makes patience a very slippery fish to hold.
You can either be patient if you're trying to master a complex tune on the guitar🎸 or you can quit and probably live the rest of your life sulking at your inability to give what it takes to play the tune. This goes for every other area of life.
Patience is synonymous with time. Here let me define patience a little bit to make it more absorbable because it can easily be confused with waiting.
PATIENCE IS NOT WAITING.
So if patience is not waiting, what is it then? I'll tell you.
Whereas waiting means staying put till something expected happens or arrives, Patience on the other hand, means staying put while doing what is necessary to make something expected to happen. It involves doing everything necessary even without seeing the glimpse of what is expected. You can say in other to be effectively patient, you also need to have faith.
Without saying, I've shared with you two things that accompany patience to make it effective and result yielding. In case you didn't notice, these are
- Work
- Faith/Believe
Others include - Consistency; which I call patience regulator
- Goals
Note that I have not listed these companies of Patience in their order of importance.
So having briefly beamed light on the first two, let's delve into the last two.
Consistency (which I dubbed patience regulator) is a key ingredient of patience as a virtue if anything meaningful will come out of the time we've invested. As a matter of fact, it regulates the amount of time we need to stay patient.
If Doni took a break from replanting his coconut seeds for 5 years and decided to relax and "enjoy himself a bit," what will happen is that the 5 years he took off will be added to whatever time it would have taken him to get his desired number of trees. So whether you're trying to master an arithmetic formula or perfect your voice on a song, whatever time you take off, whatever break you get will be an added timeframe to what it would have taken to master it thereby prolonging the time/patience required to achieve the desired result.
Lastly, goals are the initiators of patience because if there was no goal there'll be no need for patience in the first place. Like I said earlier, it is not easy to be patient: it is a very slippery fish to hold. You can easily run out of patience and opt out of your goal because there are always options available. The time and activities invested in being patient becomes lost once the initial goal is no longer the focus. However a locked focus on the original goal will guide your activities and persuade you to be consistent in giving what it takes to achieve your desires.
P.S: It is important you note that this article is not exhaustive on the subject of patience.
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