7.c 成功的核心素质——耐心

Make Time Your Friend 7.c: The Core Quality of Success: Patience

> By Li Xiaolai · 2008-05-19 · [Original (web archive)](https://web.archive.org/web/20111113124328/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/460.html) (Chinese)
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

I said long ago that the essence of so-called perseverance is the investment of time. Because when people do something and persevere in order to succeed, they eventually find that most effort is really nothing more than simple and seemingly dull repetition. Bi Shumin (毕淑敏) says in her novel *The Woman Psychologist* (《女心理师》): "What is the most important thing in a cup of coffee? Water. 98% of a cup of coffee is water." And those simple, seemingly dull repetitions are as important as the water in coffee.

So-called patience is being willing to invest time in repetition that is simple and dull but will in the end be extraordinarily meaningful. Although a considerable amount of space earlier has already been devoted to the importance of patience, it is still necessary to keep nagging a bit about the various aspects of patience.

It is no exaggeration to say that however much patience a person has, that's how high his odds of success are. Conversely, people without patience will in the end accomplish nothing. Not only is it so in reality, it is so even in stories. Pay careful attention for a moment [Translator's note: the original writes 注意以下 ("notice the following"); 注意一下 ("pay attention for a moment") is meant; translated by the intended sense] and you'll find that the protagonists of all thrilling, wonderful stories are people full of patience: Edmond Dantès in *The Count of Monte Cristo*, the banker Andy in *The Shawshank Redemption* [Translator's note: the original writes the title as 《肖恩克的救赎》, a nonstandard transliteration of "Shawshank"], Michael Scofield in *Prison Break*…… This isn't the storytellers talking nonsense; rather, only this way is it most true to life.

Look carefully, and all the negative qualities unfavorable to success are expressions of a lack of patience, or rather results of a lack of patience. "Being anxious for quick results" and "eagerness for instant success and quick profit" are the instinct of almost everyone; "quick mastery" is the wish of almost everyone. The Bible says God created humans, but in fact it should be humans who created God. That's why God has the most basic human trait: doing everything "fast"—creating this world took him only six days, and then, like everyone else, he couldn't wait to go rest. Today, middle-school textbooks print: "It is estimated that the Earth has existed for 4.6 billion years."

Laziness is a lack of patience that makes one unwilling to invest time and energy in doing anything. Short-sightedness is a lack of patience that makes one unable to use the mind to look into the future. Carelessness is a lack of patience that makes one unwilling to invest time and energy in serious investigation and research. Shallowness is a lack of patience that makes one unable to use the mind to think deeply. Parochial arrogance comes from refusing, out of a lack of patience, to observe the outside world; and all preconceptions and prejudices come from being unwilling, out of a lack of patience, to invest more time and energy in carefully distinguishing the characteristics of each individual, preferring instead to substitute crude, simple classification for thinking.

I personally only really, clearly experienced the benefits of patience two years after taking up the trade of teaching. Because there were often several hundred people in the classroom, the students' ages spanned too wide a range—sixteen-year-olds, twenty-six-year-olds, all the way up to thirty-six-year-olds—and their knowledge backgrounds were worlds apart, so every sentence I said on stage could be understood in many versions.

Once I'd taught many classes, some students would often come to discuss with me, during breaks or by email after class, some topics I had mentioned in class. Occasionally I found that some of my words had been understood in an exceptionally distorted way. At such times, inexperienced as I was, I would often flare up in a rage, secretly resenting and secretly cursing those people as truly of "low intelligence." On a few occasions, when students who had misread me pestered me, I even needed self-restraint not to lose my temper, though my expression had probably long since twisted. Once, online, I saw a certain blogger's signature, which read: "I write according to my thoughts; you read with your intelligence; never think I have any interest in misleading you. To the half-witted who insist they've been misled: sorry about that." I thought it was so very right, and felt it was a real pity I had no chance to say this to those who misread me.

Some principles you suddenly wake up to; before that, it takes time. One day I suddenly woke up and found that my original attitude and thinking were wrong. Even if some of my words were misread, and it really was the problem of those few students themselves, that doesn't mean I couldn't do a bit more work and think of ways in advance to keep those words from being misread like that again. All I needed was just a little more patience—to analyze why they would think that way, and then make the corresponding corrections and additions. Sometimes a little more patience doesn't mean spending too much more time; it may even be no more than lifting a finger.

So my thinking changed my attitude. Whenever my words were misread, I tried to set my impatience aside first—before long, I began not to feel any impatience at all—and then think calmly. Thinking changed my attitude, and attitude in turn changes one's views. Patience invested bit by bit, and the end result was that I found that in the past I had been too shallow, too crude. I found that some of my past ideas were no longer as complete and comprehensive as I had thought, so I went and supplemented them; some past ideas were no longer as logically clear as I had believed, so I went and corrected them. Once again I experienced that teaching is the best way of learning—I gave students a bit more patience, and in the end it was I myself who gained more.

Two years ago I read a book, *[The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference](http://www.amazon.com/Tipping-Point-Little-Things-Difference/dp/0316346624)*, whose author is Malcolm Gladwell [[1](#footnote_0_460 "He also wrote another interesting book, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking")]. In this book, which discusses "word of mouth—viral spread," Malcolm mentions two people with extraordinarily strong networks of connections.

> The first is a successful businessman from Dallas called Roger Horchow. He collects friends the way other people collect stamps. He remembers the little friends he played with sixty years ago; remembers the addresses of his good friends when they were small; remembers the name of the man his college girlfriend was infatuated with while studying abroad in her third year…… In Horchow's computer there is a roster containing 1,600 names and addresses, along with corresponding memos, which record in detail the circumstances of first meeting each person. "If I'm chatting with you and you happen to mention your birthday or your wedding anniversary, I'll write the date down in this little book. And then on that day, you'll get a present from me."
>
> The other is a woman called Lois Weisberg. What's astonishing about Lois is that she finds everyone interesting. A friend of Lois's, talking about her, said, "Every day the things Lois says are like this: 'Oh, you know what? I just met the most wonderful person! You'll even fall in love with him!'" Another friend of Lois's said, "Lois can always see things in you that even you don't see." Lois has an incredible, uncanny nature that lets her become good friends with everyone she meets.

Remembering everyone you've met takes great patience; discovering the strengths of each person takes even more patience. In another book I read recently, *The Road Less Traveled* (《少有人走的路》) [[2](#footnote_1_460 "The Road Less Traveled, by M. Scott Peck ")], the psychologist M. Scott Peck says that so-called true love is patience, and so-called patience is, in essence, the investment of time. Whoever you are, you should at least be a bit more patient with yourself. Anyone who has shared some stretch of time with us, whether we like them or hate them, has already become part of our lives; better to have a bit more patience with them. Everything we do, because of the existence of our friend time, becomes part of our lives and cannot be removed; better to have a bit more patience with those things too.

Where on earth does patience come from? First, all patience comes from understanding. There's a marathon runner called Yamada Honichi (山田本一) (world champion in 1984 and 1986) who seems able to tell us the answer. In his autobiography he says this:

> "Before every race, I would ride along the course and look it over carefully, and draw the more conspicuous landmarks along the way: for example, the first landmark was a bank, the second a big tree, the third a red house, and so on all the way to the finish line of the course. Once the race began, I would charge at sprint speed toward the first target, and when I reached the first target, I would charge at the same speed toward the second. The course of forty-odd kilometers was broken down by me into these few small targets and run easily. At first I didn't understand this principle; I set my target at the finish line forty-odd kilometers away, and as a result, by the time I'd run a dozen-odd kilometers I was exhausted—I'd been daunted by the long road ahead."

In my writing classes, the most important thing I stress over and over is "You'd better know exactly what you want," which actually means the same thing. Patience doesn't come out of thin air; it needs understanding to support it. But here a vicious circle has already appeared: understanding itself also takes patience; people without patience don't have the patience to understand anything deeply, and so in the end they have no patience for anything.

About patience, there's another story.

> Years ago an American expert did this experiment: some children only four years old were each left alone in a room and given a marshmallow, and told that the adult was going to leave for fifteen minutes, and that if during this time they didn't eat the marshmallow, they would be given another marshmallow when the adult came back. For a child only four years old, shut in a room with nothing in it, all his attention was on that marshmallow; fifteen minutes was so very long, and the temptation of that marshmallow so great. The research found that most of the children who could hold back from eating the marshmallow became successful people when they grew up; while the children who rushed to eat the marshmallow mostly turned out quite ordinary when they grew up.

The key to this story is not how many children ultimately grew up to be successful people; the key is that it tells us that at the age of four, each person's degree of patience is already very different. Perhaps patience is innate—although I personally don't believe it. The more likely explanation is that everyone's innate degree of patience is roughly the same; it's just that the influence, over a short four years, of factors such as the surrounding environment and the behavior patterns of the adults around them has already made the children's degrees of patience vastly different. If people differ vastly from one another, then this example tells us there are already obvious differences at the age of four.

I myself am not someone born with very good patience. But, more or less, in some respects I appear to have more patience than those around me, and have benefited a great deal from it. Thinking back carefully, this has quite a lot to do with learning to play the guitar when I was very small—thanks to my father for giving me an acoustic guitar on my 11th birthday. Although in the end I didn't play very well, that experience of practicing told me that even to learn to play a single bar, and play it well, you might have to practice it dozens of times, plus hundreds more times of admiring yourself afterward. More or less because of this experience, I'm not afraid of repetition when I do things. If talent is that 2% of "coffee powder," it still needs that 98% of repetition as "water" to become a fragrant cup of coffee.

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Footnotes:

1. He also wrote another interesting book, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking [[↩](#identifier_0_460)]
2. [The Road Less Traveled, by M. Scott Peck](http://www.amazon.com/Road-Less-Traveled-25th-Anniversary/dp/0743243153) [[↩](#identifier_1_460)]

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