I’ve had this thought about the two different types of patience for a while: active and passive.
When I recently read the wonderfully-written Farnam Street blog about it, I was able to further hone in on what it means and why you should surround yourself with actively patient people.
There’s a common quote: be active with your actions and passive with the results.
99% of people will not be active in their actions, yet be horribly impassive with their results.
We wait around our entire lives for the perfect time or just for solutions to pop up in our brain for our difficult problems, but that’s just not how life works.
You must be actively patient, active with your results and patient with your results.
Passive patience is where you’re not active with your actions.
You’re just going with the flow, kind of just taking what life is giving you at any particular moment.
That’s how most people are, and I personally think that’s a terrible way to live our only life.
You’re just going to stay around and wait for the things you want in life to happen for you, when you don’t even know if you’re going to be alive tomorrow? Never made sense to me, even from a young age.
So I’ve developed agency in my life, a true action for bias in any situation I am in.
Even if I am inactive, I would have to be not tricking myself that I am active because I consciously made the decision to be honest with my self.
It’s similar to taking agency for your life, but the point is that you have to be active, truly active, with your actions, and only ever be patient with the results.