Indeed, research suggests that patient people tend to be more cooperative, more empathic, more equitable, and more forgiving. Comer and Leslie E. Sekerka in their study. Evidence of this is found in a study that put participants into groups of four and asked them to contribute money to a common pot, which would be doubled and redistributed.
The game gave players a financial incentive to be stingy, yet patient people contributed more to the pot than other players did. The interpersonally patient people even tended to be less lonely, perhaps because making and keeping friends—with all their quirks and slip-ups—generally requires a healthy dose of patience.
On a group level, patience may be one of the foundations of civil society. Patient people are more likely to vote , an activity that entails waiting months or years for our elected official to implement better policies. Evolutionary theorists believe that patience helped our ancestors survive because it allowed them to do good deeds and wait for others to reciprocate, instead of demanding immediate compensation which would more likely lead to conflict than cooperation.
In that same vein, patience is linked to trust in the people and the institutions around us. The road to achievement is a long one, and those without patience—who want to see results immediately—may not be willing to walk it.
In her study, Schnitker also examined whether patience helps students get things done. In five surveys they completed over the course of a semester, patient people of all stripes reported exerting more effort toward their goals than other people did.
You also have the hour news networks, who have to fill space with news even when nothing new is happening. It is such an interesting question: How does the media cycle look if pauses are valued? What does Twitter look like with pauses? What does the hour news cycle look like with a moment of pause and reflection? What happens to us as individuals and as a society if we eliminate wait times from our lives completely?
We want to eliminate them because we imagine them as being the antithesis of productivity and the good life. I think we are going to have to build in pauses and boredom and daydreaming to get people to imagine new futures.
I think we will have to build wait times into our workweek in order to get people to come up with new and inventive ways to solve problems. Boredom, daydreaming, and waiting activate a part of the brain called the default network, which is often referred to as the imagination network.
Have you ever been taking a shower, and then all of a sudden you have a revelation? Or sitting in traffic and you solve a problem, or a new idea comes to you? It's really because you're letting yourself daydream and be bored, and those are the moments when our brain makes connections that we couldn't have found if we thought them out.
We need these moments of pause in order for our brain to make creative and inventive connections across ideas, but we're not letting the workforce do that in any way. We're just asking people to use their time productively, but we have a very skewed definition of what productivity means.
What are the costs to society when there are no pauses? I think we're losing the capacity to do nothing. In my own life, I have a very difficult time standing in line without taking my phone out of my pocket and scrolling through Twitter. I feel like I need to be doing something at all times, or I feel a sense of guilt about my use of time.
The end result of that is higher stress levels, and an unhealthier population. If we could get past the desire to occupy every minute of our days, we would actually devote hours to things that we care about rather than just feeling burned out from paying attention to things all day long. I have that wanting to be connected and paying attention, but I also think, for me, there's this radical fear of being bored. So many people have this deep-seated fear of boredom. It is an emotional state that we avoid at all costs.
Part of that is the existential crises that boredom might evoke within us. Part of us fear that waiting is a reflection of the fact that maybe life is just about time passing. That is one of our deep fears: that waiting represents life in its essence, that life itself is about just having time pass, and occupying ourselves in various ways as we watch the hours go by.
I think we ultimately will work to avoid the discomforts of boredom because we don't want to have to face our own mortality. Those deep existential questions emerge when we see time, and waiting makes us see time in ways that fun and productive time doesn't.
Historically, we always have been really bad at waiting, we've just had different frames of references. Henri Nouwen. Barry is a writer, coach, and course creator that has a passion for Mental Health and Spiritual Formation. Contact me here. Get two free ebooks. A quite personal blog. I thought I would write about my dance with depression.
It all came to a bit of […]. I need some and probably you do as well. What world are they living in? The whole "good things come to those who wait" notion is a fallacy for most of us. The truth is that what most of us experience is that doors don't just open, and good things don't just come because we wait for them.
I don't presume to know that this hasn't been and is not the truth for someone, somewhere, somehow. Maybe good things have come to some who have just waited. Maybe doors have indeed just magically opened for some. I accept that these statements might be true for the people who said them, came up with them or coined them some time ago. Maybe this was their reality, maybe it is their children's reality - but it is not mine, and it isn't the reality for any accomplished and successful people I know.
I think good things come to those who want something so bad they can't sit still. I have been asking people this question a lot lately because I am very interested in what drives people to excel, what motivates their discipline and what steps they take to realize their dreams. In all my conversations and research, what I have learned is that successful and fulfilled leaders are not waiting for anything to happen. People who are working in their dream careers are not waiting for anything to happen.
Instead, they pay the price that leadership and career advancement require, and they hustle. Waiting for good things to happen and hoping for someone to open a door reflects a passive and undetermined path to career and leadership success, and just the thought of it leaves me feeling powerless.
I read somewhere a long time ago that "The dream is real, but the hustle is sold separately. We have to step up and lead our own journeys, create our own experiences and carve our own paths. This is not a trial rehearsal, a pre-test or practice exam.
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