Back in the days when I was looking for a job, I read an article on job interview tips. One talked about how to handle interview questions, such as, "What, if any, do you consider your weak points?" It was the one question considered likely to be asked, usually after the applicant's well rehearsed recitation of his or her strong attributes. Saying, "I don't have any" is not a good answer as it would sound a little too arrogantly pompous or unreasonably over confident. The go-to answer the article advised was to say: "I find myself impatient at times, often expecting others to do the same, whether the task is important or not". That answer would have covered the "weak point" part while conveying to the interviewer the applicant's go-getter attitude and willingness to tackle assignments head-on in the shortest amount of time.
Fortunately, no such question was asked of me when I went for job interviews so I never had the chance to test and/or prove the technique's relevance or validity. We know patience's nobility but the thing is, should impatience be considered a virtue or not. Can we safely say, "It depends"?
History is filled with stories of how impatience "paid off" and where they resulted in disaster. Naturally, too, we see how it affects us, see it in others and the role it plays in many social and work experiences, but it seems that both good and bad come out in unequal doses where patience and impatience are concerned.
Did Colonel George Armstrong Custer and 270 of his men die at Little Big Horn on June 16,1876 because he was too impatient in committing his troops too prematurely into battle against the Lakota and Cheyenne warriors when he could have waited for perhaps another day or two? Some historians speculated on that.
On another page of history, at the crucial point of WWII, General Leslie Groves was picked to head the Manhattan Project in September, 1942. Hitler's Germany was rushing to produce the first atomic bomb. The Allied forces did everything to thwart the plan but meanwhile the U.S. was working furiously to do the same - achieve the biggest game changer of that conflict. Gen. Groves was picked for a lot of reasons, including his ability to manage huge U.S. Army Corps projects, including construction of the Pentagon building earlier in his career, but he had the reputation of a very impatient manager, a "doer" and effective administrator and "driver" of men. The Manhattan Project finished and successfully tested the first atomic bomb in record time and the rest is history. That was the upside of impatience because had the Third Reich got to the bomb first, world history would have been written a lot differently from what it is today.
Driving through traffic, waiting in line for anything anywhere, or simply waiting in general are everyone's peeve.
Let's be reminded, however, that compared to a few centuries ago we know the human mind, even its physiology, was acclimated to waiting for long periods of time. It took a "grueling ten weeks at sea", that's two and a half months, for all 102 passengers on the Mayflower to cross the Atlantic from England to reach what is now the coast of Massachusetts. The human body and mental capacity to endure managed to survive that one and similar subsequent voyages that followed, though not to be ignored, were tragic consequences for many of the hapless voyagers.
Today, trans-Atlantic travelers would often grumble to no end about the 2-4 hours of pre-flight "ordeal" waiting for a plane trip that would take 8 hours from London Heathrow to JFK airport in New York. So, literally one may eat breakfast on one continent and have dinner on another. The Concorde, during its relatively short service, shortened the gap to between breakfast and lunch when it flew from Heathrow to JFK in 2 hours, 53 minutes. Do we know how many meals the Mayflower passengers ate (when they could) and threw up in those ten weeks?
A study I read somewhere showed that internet users who are used to high speed internet service (2000 to 5000 Mbps) are likely more impatient than those only able to download at the "snail's pace" of 182 Mbps. Let's put this in perspective. Mbps stands for Megabits per second. 182 Mbps would still be eye-popping fast when compared to the telegraph transmission a century ago, or the teletype and fax machines that followed. Today, at the click of a mouse we see audio/video appear on screen in full high definition at the rate of many multiple frames per second. But we are more impatient today than those who marveled at the Pony Express delivered mail. By the way, that program of using relays of "horse-mounted riders" did not last but for a little over a year, between April,1860 to October 1861, and only between Missouri and California.
Imagine for a moment what our hunter/gatherer ancestors went through. The hunters often took hours or even days to take down prey. The gatherers spent most of their days foraging for plant-based edibles of berries and fruits and tender leafy greens. Unfortunately, from the moment they learned to be impatient, the psychological and physiological changes that followed laid the foundation for what ails much of society today.
There is hope to reverse that.
You are driving, following proper traffic etiquette, on a single lane of cars lining up to enter the main road or highway, when one driver cuts in front of you. You feel instantaneous uncontrollable seething that would bother you for quite a bit of the entire driving experience. Try this sometime instead. Whenever another driver signals intention to squeeze in front of you, ease up and let the car through and see how euphoric it feels compared to feeling irritated. It will amaze you how so much better you will feel the entire trip.
Various studies had shown that on, say 20 blocks of normal traffic, cars that weave in and out of lanes to get ahead, will likely get to the last block ahead of those who drove steadily with the traffic flow, by ten, twenty but not more than thirty seconds! Was that all worth it?
On the flip side of that, if not for impatience nothing will get done on time or ahead of schedule. If not for impatience the Panama and Suez Canals will not have been completed. Both canals have shortened transit times for cargo and passenger ships by a remarkable amount. Much of the scientific and economic breakthroughs were driven by impatience.
Therefore, the long and short of it, pun very well intended, we do need the thorny sides of impatience and all the gently undulating nature of patience. Perhaps on a 7-to-1 ratio, patience-to impatience?
Meanwhile, experience something - if you have not had it before - by willingly, if not gladly, letting someone through ahead of you. It's the one facet of human nature that we can conceivably do with little effort. Yet, it is strangely true that it is not just psychologically pleasing but it is actually physiologically healthful, for "a steady heart rate and stable blood pressure are preferred in anyone navigating to get from point A to point B", what a cardiologist might say.
No comments:
Post a Comment