commitment – The Life and Times of Ben Weinberg

We are all imbued with the important personal trait of having patience. I believe that each of us is imbued with a certain amount of it though and there’s a certain limit or tolerance level that we have within us innately. It can be difficult to augment or increase the amount of patience you have without serious mental training and willpower. Everybody has some amount of patience, but that level will stay the same unless you can train yourself to learn to have more of it and to put yourself into situations where it is tested.

In my opinion, patience is the most important trait that a mature adult can have and can change your life for the better or for the worse depending upon how much it is exercised. The level of patience you have or what you teach yourself to tolerate will depend upon your overall maturity, resilience, and willpower. The less patience you have, the more stressful your life will be ironically. The more patience you have, the less stressful your life will be too. Managing your stress levels comes as a result of how much you are able to flex your ‘patience’ muscle.

Patience such as willpower takes time to develop but the more of it, you’re able to accrue, the more payback you’re likely to see later. For example, if you’re at a bureaucratic office of some sort and you are given a number to wait your turn and you’re not sure how long it will take for your number to be called, there’s no logical reason to complain about it. The more you get peeved about it, the more it will backfire for you. Why not make the most of your time and read a book, catch up on e-mails, listen to music, or even make a few calls to pass the hour(s)?

Not only in bureaucratic functions will patience serve you but in every aspect of your life really. When you’re learning a new language, you need to have patience regarding your ability to obtain and retain what you have learned in order to improve. When you’re starting a relationship with someone, you have to be patient with their faults and with their quirks because they are going to have to do the same with you as you get to know each other more and more.

When you’re getting used to your responsibilities and roles in a new job, it will take both patience and time to get the swing of things and you have to accept that you’ll likely make mistakes at first. When you are starting a business for the first time and you have to learn a lot of new skills as well as take on duties that you have never had before to grow the business. In any of these hypothetical but possible situations to occur in your lifetime, you have to be patient in any of these personal or professional endeavors regardless of what they are.

When things are not going your way, you just got to keep your composure, keep pushing through, and stay optimistic that things will eventually work out. Like quitting too early, giving up on exercising your patience will backfire on you more often than not. Nobody really likes someone who loses their patience a lot. There’s a time and a place for confrontation but that is a very rare occurrence especially in an extreme circumstance where you really cannot wait or deal with any further delays. If you don’t have anywhere to be, if there’s a solution to be had, if it’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, it’s better to be patient than blowing your gasket and letting go of your emotions.

You will earn respect from other people if you are able to be level-headed, to not let your emotions overtake your decision-making ability, and to keep calm under outside pressure(s). It is a great way to set yourself apart when you are able to exercise patience in 95% of situations and in the other 5% or able to de-escalate the situation calmly without losing control in some way. It is also a fallacy to suggest that you can’t exercise patience and stand up for yourself at the same time.

You do not have to be confrontational, but you do have to advocate for your interests and for your livelihood. This all can be done without losing one’s patience and it will be a sign of how emotionally mature you are when you are able to express your emotions in a healthy manner. Being able to exercise patience on a consistent basis will also make you happier, healthier, and more appreciative of others, flaws and all, when you can maintain a real sense of calm and composure.

Exercising patience is a real skill and positive trait to have that will pay off for you and then some throughout your life. However, like any muscle, it has to be exercised constantly and because life will test you, often at the most random times, this particular muscle will be tested often and you have to decide how much you can adapt and beat these tests that life will throw at you. Speaking as someone writing this article who sometimes struggles with exercising my own patience, it is a lot of work, but it is worthwhile to get better and better at it.

Whereas meaningless and trivial things would have bothered you in the past, if you can simply brush them off and move on quickly to focus your patience and your willpower on things that actually matter to your life and livelihood, then you will be on the right path. Do not let the small irritants of your day-to-day life affect your patience because you will waste precious emotional capital on inconsequential problems. When the waiter takes too long with the bill, when the checkout cashier is rude to you, and when the boss wants to call an extra meeting over something that was previously agreed upon, take a deep breath and let it all slide off your back.

Remember to guide your thoughts to real things that affect you and wait out or not react to the small irritants. The real battles of your patience will be much larger and longer in scale so don’t waste exerting a lack of patience for those irritants of minutes or hours. Save up your patience for the days, months, and years in your personal and professional endeavors that will require you to be in top shape emotionally to handle the challenges that are to come along.

As I have mentioned in other articles, a real mixture of commitment, patience, and willpower will set you apart and cause you to succeed in the long run where others do not. Those three emotional traits are a sign of both intelligence and maturity. Letting them decay or not exercising them consistently will set you back and cause you to fail more. Always do your best to keep those three traits in mind when you set your mind on something new because you will need all three traits of commitment, patience, and willpower to get ahead in life and to make your life the best it can be.

According to the University of Southern California’s Laboratory of Neuroimaging, the average person has about 70,000 thoughts per day. That is about 45 thoughts per minute and 2,700 thoughts per hour. Most likely, 90% of those thoughts are focused on the day-to-day habits and responsibilities that we take upon ourselves out of necessity. Where we go to eat, where we go shop for food, what to clean and how to clean it, and the need to brush, dress, and groom ourselves so that we look presentable to the world. However, what makes us stand out as a species is our ability to pull a few ideas from these thousands of thoughts that end up changing the world in some measurable way.

Thoughts can be random, scattered, and hard to quantify but with concentrated effort and documentation, these thoughts become ideas that later can become a reality. How does an idea turn into a real thing? Well, one part of making an idea real is jotting it down on paper or even on a smartphone today and really spending a lot of time focusing on the plausibility of it. Ideas can make the best sense in the world to you but if they are not popular or don’t transcend just your belief in them, they will go nowhere fast.

Ideas are meant to be tested, changed, and optimized so that people believe in them, for better or for worse. The paradox that is inherent with ideas is that they are very similar to human nature. They can be used for the greatest good or the greatest evil. Ideas are so powerful that wars have been waged over them, millions have lost their lives, and untold amounts of money have been spent to promote or degrade them.

When you really think about it, ideas that are put into action have caused changes to human civilizations throughout the millennia. Whether its education, health, infrastructure, scientific advancement, community building, ideas are at the forefront of upending the status quo and changing human lives, sometimes for the better or sometimes for worse. While I just mentioned the positive advancements that come from ideas, it is also valid that ideas have led to war, poverty, inequality, destruction, and multiple isms that have caused conflict and strife among nations, races, and religions.

You may be reading this article and wondering that maybe it’s best to not contribute your ideas to the world in some way. I think this is a false dichotomy because I like to think that if your ideas are not harming people, are not harming the planet, and can lead to a better community, country or world, then you should try out your ideas and see what happens. The key part to realizing an idea of yours is to see how other people react to it. Are they happier because of your idea? Are they healthier because of it? Are they better educated because of your idea?

You should be asking yourself: Is my idea doing some sort of measurable good for the world and how can I improve upon it? Ideas start out as being imperfect but once you start acting to make those ideas a reality in the world, you will soon learn that implementation of those ideas will take serious hard work and effort. Getting feedback from unbiased users or participants is a key step to see whether the idea is worth merit and whether it is sustainable or not in the long-term. Imposing your idea on the world without substantive feedback or without understanding how your idea fits in to your specific niche will end up in failure.

If you have an idea, remember to write it down and construct how it could work and whether it would be worth pursuing. Similar to starting a business or launching a campaign, you have to test drive the idea first to see if people would be interested in what you have to offer whether they are paying customers or voters from the town you are running your campaign in. Careful assessment and fleshing out of your idea will make a better idea and will make your idea stand out from others that are similar or may be able to usurp yours.

Ideas do not always have to be original but there must be some added benefit or advantage that hasn’t been tried before or could change the status quo in some positive way. There is a rightful stigma against ideas, but it is important to realize that our faith in ideas is crucial to keeping civilization going even when some ideas turn out to be bad for us. Our shared belief in ideas is what leads to massive companies like Google or Apple becoming the most influential or profitable in the world and has led to nation-states forming in the past few centuries such as the United States of America or the United Kingdom.

Without thoughts that turned into ideas which turned into actions, where would humanity be? Our ability to analyze, process, and think about how to change the world or how to introduce something new in the world is what sets us apart from other species on the planet. Essentially, the story of human progress could be argued to revolve around how to maximize the impact and spread of good ideas and how to minimize the influence and the source of bad ideas. Most of us tend to shy away from sharing our ideas or trying them out but I think having a more entrepreneurial and innovative vision is a key part of being self-actualized as a person.

Having a sense of belief in your ideas and how you can leave the world better than you found it is extremely powerful. While working on the ideas of others and promoting them to the world is also very useful, I tend to think that each and every one of us has a good idea that could be fleshed out, tried out, and implemented with the help of others, which would play a key part in making the world a better place.

Because the world is so interconnected, ideas spread so rapidly that it can be overwhelming with how much is out there. However, the ideas that stick around are the ones that take time to develop, that are tweaked with, that refine their logic and their execution, and for which have gained a solid following of people who believe in those ideas. An idea that has a powerful story which resonates with people can also withstand the test of time.

The next time you have an idea, think deeply about it. Maybe you’re on your commute to work or you’re in the bathroom, or you’re on a walk in the local park, but don’t let it slip away if you think that it can serve a positive purpose and if it is actionable. Ideas can come and go in a millisecond so being able to concentrate on the idea, remember it, and write it down as soon as possible could pay off in a big way. Another way to let your ideas form is to focus on the impact that it could have and how people could benefit from the idea(s). I believe that the more observant you are of your surroundings, the better your ideas will be. Another part of gaining traction with your ideas is reading books, whether they were entrepreneurs, inventors, politicians, and reformists from different eras of history.

You may find that your idea is not so unique and may date back a few decades or even a few centuries but maybe that idea never took off. You are eager to learn more about that so you do your research, you find out more about the history of the idea, and you decide why it may be right for the present and into the future based on changes to society. Just because an idea failed in the past doesn’t mean it can’t make a return with a few useful tweaks. From the electric car to virtual reality to smartphones, these kinds of ideas have their roots buried firmly in previous unsuccessful efforts in the past only to be revived because of inventors and thinkers who thought of how to adapt these inventions to the modern era.

Ideas are powerful because of are shared belief in them and how they can change the world. However, without serious action, commitment, and hard work, ideas of ours will just stay like that as ideas alone. Ideas without belief or without support from others will go nowhere. The key to implementing good ideas in our era is that they have been tested, have some measurable benefit to humanity, and have staying power because of their relevance to our societies. If you are not sure that you are an ‘ideas’ person, try to concentrate on your thoughts and remember whether there are any of them in your daily life that could become a reality.

You must decide if any of these ideas of yours could be written down, planned out, implemented, and eventually supported by the work of others. Once you go through that chronological checklist, you will be ready to start putting those ideas into action. Your ideas may ultimately fail and you may get discouraged but if your idea(s) were able to have a kind of positive impact on someone or something because of that thought that you first had go through your mind, you will know that it will have been worth the effort of carrying it out in the first place.