Patience means everything…
Until it doesn’t.
Patience isn’t the same thing as resilience, and resilience, the ability to withstand the pressure, definitely means a lot when it comes to getting better.
Then again…
What is resilience without enough pressure?
So…intensity needs to be there in order for there to be enough pressure to create the diamond.
…
Nothing is as it seems on the surface, Reader.
There is always more to what’s being said than the sentence itself.
This is why so many people remain lost. This is why progress, success, fulfillment is given up on so often.
What we need in order to really get where we want to go is actually a plethora of things. It’s a collaboration of our greatest habits, a good mindset, passion, and intensity.
But let’s stick with the point here.
…
Patience will do a lot for us.
It’s done a hell of a lot for me
It will keep us from trying to do too much at once. When we think of our most lofty goals, the path to get there isn’t just long, it’s unknown. No matter how detailed and thought out the plan, we’ll never be ready for everything that comes at us.
We’ll have relationships end with people we thought would always be there, financial crises pop up that we never planned for, rejections that we thought were in the bag, and projects far exceeding their deadline.
Life is complex, abstract, and unforeseeable in a lot of ways.
That’s why we need patience.
But, beware…
A dream will never come true with only one virtue, like patience.
It may be your greatest strength. You may be so patient you can sit and watch a tree grow. You may be patient enough that you can watch your child spend an hour trying to figure out that a square peg won’t fit in the round hole.
But patience in context to your goals is just the equivalent to observation.
It’s the dream without the action.
The action is the pressure.
And the intensity of that pressure will always matter.
…
If someone tells you to, “just be patient. It will come.”
It’s time for you to walk away. You don’t need people around you to tell you to be patient. You can practice that skill on your own.
You need people to help you realize pressure. People that can see you and your work from the outside and say, “you can do better.” People to keep you accountable, apply pressure to you.
…
Think of the day you’re going to die.
Does that scare you? Does it intimidate you that death may get to you before your dreams do?
Good.
Because no matter what inspirational things you’re told and no matter how many people coddle you to make you feel better about where you are…
Time won’t stop.
Aging won’t stop.
And even if you could stop those things, the endlessness of them would give you even more reason to stop putting pressure on yourself to attain what you see in your mind.
The pressure of the finite is something you need.
Don’t act like it does not exist.
“Don’t behave as if you are destined to live forever. What’s fated hangs over you. As long you live and while you can, become good now.” — Marcus Aurelius
…
The past year of my life has flown by.
And those years have repeated that cycle enough that now I can see the level in which I applied pressure.
Some were good. Some were…well horrible.
Being too patient is a spell we put on ourselves.
“Patience will be the death of you” — Tom Bilyeau
And what we don’t realize is that patience is one of those things that is an amazing benefit for our moments.
It’s for those moments when we’re with family, when we’re staring at a blank piece of paper, when we’re taking in nature, when we need the world to stop in order to focus on what we have in front of us.
But we need to be able to fluidly move in and out of it.
It’s the amount of pressure we apply to our work that gets us to our goals.
They’re both needed.
They work symbiotically with each other.
Pressure creates a consistency. It creates enough of it that we actually see things happen, no matter how minuscule.
Patience and Pressure.
And most often it’s the lack of our pressure, not our patience, that gets in the way.
Why?
Because of our instinctive fear.
Pressure forces us to face the uncomfortable, scary, risky things. It tells us how far we can truly push before things get out of hand.
But without it, we never find the edge. We never find our true capability; how much intensity we can handle.
We assume it.
Which inevitably leaves us short of it.
Patience and pressure.
Truth and Love, Reader.
If you like my writing and the things I question, you might(I mean…probably) also like my newsletter.
Substack is where you can subscribe to my newsletter and get not just my medium stories, but chat with me directly, have access to my all of my content in one place, and have access to The Art of Questioning audio. Only at https://zackaryhenson.substack.com
There are so many great stories on Medium! If you want to have access to some of the best writing by thousands of creators, start your membership with the link below, which will also support my writing.
Remember…question everything! https://zackaryhenson.medium.com/subscribe
—
This post was previously published on medium.com.
***
From The Good Men Project on Medium
 |
 |
 |
 |
***
Join The Good Men Project as a Premium Member today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
A $50 annual membership gives you an all access pass. You can be a part of every call, group, class and community.
A $25 annual membership gives you access to one class, one Social Interest group and our online communities.
A $12 annual membership gives you access to our Friday calls with the publisher, our online community.
Register New Account
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
—–
Photo credit: Rob Wicks on Unsplash
