Patience

I've Been Telling My Daughters the Wrong Thing

One of the first phrases I ever said to my daughters was “patience is a virtue.”

They were minutes old. They were desperate to see their mom and to be fed. My wife was still in the surgery room, recovering from her C-section. So it was me, a newborn, and a wait that neither of us could do anything about.

We went through that twice. 2009 and 2011.

They are teenagers now, and I still tell them the same story. So often that they finish it for me. “Yes, dad, we know, patience is a virtue.”

Not that they practice it much. But they are improving.

To be honest, I don’t blame them. I am 47 years old and being patient is still not the easiest thing in the world.

I keep working at it anyway, because I am a big believer in the importance of this action for my personal and professional life.

Notice that I said action.

That word turns out to be doing a lot of work. Kate Sweeny, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, makes the case that patience is not a virtue at all. It is emotion regulation. In her words, on the Hogan Assessments blog: “That really takes patience quite out of the virtue realm and situates it in the nerdy research on emotion regulation. It’s not quite as poetic, but I think it’s much more practical.”

Which means I have been telling my daughters the wrong thing for seventeen years.

Patience is not something you have. It is something you do.

In our business, I do it in small moments.

It is the gap between asking a director for a shot and the moment that shot makes it to air. It is understanding that they know better than I do, and that the right image will go to program when it is ready.

It is the time you give engineers when a problem arises. Being patient enough to wait for the explanation, because in those moments solving the issue matters more than having an answer right away.

Neither of those is a virtue. Both are a decision, made under pressure, usually at the exact moment I least feel like making it.

And here is the part that gives me hope.

If patience were a virtue, you would either have it or you would not. But patience is an ability that allows you to endure frustrating circumstances, and as with any ability, it is something we can learn. Which means every frustrating situation is not just a test. It is a rep.

The show that runs long. The feed that does not come back. The answer that takes another ten minutes.

You do not become patient by waiting. You become patient by practicing.

I am still practicing. My daughters are still practicing. Some nights we are both better at it than others.

Where does your patience break first: with people, with technology, or with time? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.