Patience

Image by Brett Jordan at Flickr

(Image by Brett Jordan at Flickr)

We all do a lot of waiting in fog. Information fog. We swim in an ocean of information, but the nuggets we need simply aren’t available when we want or need them.

Right now, for me that’s especially true of one of the projects I’m trying to wrangle. Something essential that we needed in, oh, May keeps getting pushed back. It now reportedly won’t be available until mid-July. The organization responsible has put the entire project in danger of collapse, which will cost all the participants millions in future revenues. I feel a little… steamed… about this. I’ve done some of their job for them in the past but I can’t pull this one out of the fire.

When the information fog clears, maybe I’ll be able to see a way out of this corner.

At the other end of the scale is whatever happened in Russia over the weekend. What was that? A coup attempt? An aborted civil war? A feint to try to draw out onto the streets anyone in Russia who doesn’t support the current regime, so they could be rounded up? That last possibility is a reach, but within the realm of possibility. So far the news about what happened doesn’t add up. It smells like we’re missing something essential and large.

When the information fog clears (if it ever does), maybe we’ll know what to call that episode.

We live in an era when people in developed countries have come to expect immediacy. We expect messages to go through instantly and we expect recipients to respond promptly. When we want to know something, we expect a search engine to serve up the answer right away. If it takes more than a few seconds to open the web page with the answer, we’re annoyed.

I’m not immune to this. For the troubled project, I expected the fog to clear last Tuesday. So much slippage and so much vagueness about when work will even be attempted irritate me.

I feel impatient.

But I can’t make that fog clear faster. The intelligence community can’t make the Russian fog clear with a snap of their fingers. We can wait productively. For my part, I’m trying a tenuous reach to see whether I can find a supplier no one else approached. Still, I must wait. Work can’t go beyond a certain point until the fog clears. I must make myself be patient.

Patience is a valuable skill.

The more important or momentous the undertaking, the more vital patience becomes. It is one of the defining characteristics of a good scientist, good engineer, good astronaut, good ground crew, good fill-in-the-blank. It can be patience to wait for a cell culture to mature, finish building something in the right way, reach a viable launch window, achieve a necessary advance in technology… or simply emerge from the fog to be able to see which way to go.

This isn’t explicitly taught in school.

During my career I’ve had the honor of getting to work closely with more than my fair share of people who were phenomenally brilliant. Some of them produced magnificent work that changed the world, often noticed only by insiders in their field and given no fanfare. Others produced only a series of ambitious failures.

The difference between the fantastic producers and the failures was a matter of self-discipline, a matter of patience. The producers went through the slow, tedious slog needed to bring their entire idea into reality, piece by piece, carefully thought through, refined and tested meticulously. The failures dove in with great enthusiasm at the start, reached a point where they could see a shell of their idea taking shape, and then lost interest. The beginning was the exciting part, charging ahead. They lacked the patience for the slow, tedious slog.

Some brilliant people can and do make a career out of a series of failures. But if you want to change the world, the main trait you need is not being smart. It’s knowing when and how to be patient.