I just landed in Manchester after not eating for a while, I was starving. My friends and I raced to a trendy new restaurant where you order food from different places to one table. My food came quickly, colourful beef stir-fry. I feel like it’s important to wait until everyone’s food arrives to start eating. Adams’s food took what felt like a lifetime to come.
I sat for ten minutes as I watched the heat dwindle from my plate before a voice in my head said, “ok, you proved you’re a good friend that practices what he preaches but it’s been too long now”. Another voice said, “You’ve waited all this time just to give up? Wait a little longer”. A few moments after I listened to that voice, the waiter came striding towards our table with Adam’s meal.
Almost all the time, I would have folded and taken a bite to see the food arrive seconds later, dressing me in disappointment. How often do we give up on our goals when our destination is footsteps ahead?
Patience is something I find hard to be friends with. Yet I’m aware it’s such an underrated and priceless asset.
I love hearing stories about persistent people who kept at something for an inconceivable amount of time without throwing in the towel. Like James Dyson who made 5,127 prototypes of the first bagless vacuum cleaner before succeeding. When have I even tried something 100 times …
These days when I feel my patience seep out, I tell myself, just wait ten seconds longer, ten seconds pass and I say just wait another ten seconds. In that additional window I wait, I usually solve the puzzle, or what I need, arrives.
Choose something you enjoy or believe in so much, the thought of giving up is more daunting than the thought of persisting.
On a micro-scale, just add 10 seconds, then another 10 seconds after that … then another after that.
Most people don’t master patience until they’re old, after living a life of seeing how little impatience does for the well-being of a person. Imagine if you start to master this early, how much of a powerful force you will be throughout your life’s journey.
JESSE JUNE 
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