Why patience is the greatest policy one can have?

 

Patience is the greatest policy. 

If you sow a seed of mango in the soil how much time it will take to grow the mango tree to harvest the ripen mango? You will say ‘a long time…may be one year, may be two years, and may be more than that.’  That depends on how much effort you are putting to nurture the seedling. Success in every field of life is just like that. For cultivating a good quality mango tree in order to harvest good quality of mangoes needs good quality of soil, sufficient water, sufficient care and above all ‘patience’. If someone will ask me ‘what is the greatest policy of human being according to you?’, without spending a second I must reply ‘patience’. I shall not say ‘honesty’ because according to me if you lose patience, in a certain point you will also lose honesty, as to make the thing unnecessarily faster you may be attracted to do some tricks, which may not be the honest way. Therefore, patience and honesty are strongly correlated.

This is also true in the field of research. Getting a good positive result or data through an experiment is always the mostly expected and demanding thing in the research. No researcher wants to get stuck in an experiment which has to be repeated continuously. However, it is also necessary for your research project to get finished in time. But to get a desired result a researcher must have tenacity. Suppose, you are a PhD student of science and provided with a critical project which needs super experimental and analytical skills and you do not have all those skills while joining the project. But you are sure that if you can fulfill the objectives of the project successfully, you will definitely have a big-shot publication and reputation. What will be your strategy after joining the project? In most of the cases, people start their work with huge enthusiasm and effort but after some repeated failures they lose their enthusiasm and use to struggle mentally and physically. That is just because of the lack of patience. The patience of gaining required skills, the patience of conducting the same experiment repeatedly until getting the desired logical result, the patience of covering the path to get a ground breaking seminal publication. It is true that it is not easy to handle the failure, specially when your neighboring coworker is getting success.

Copyrighted pic: Patience is greatest virtue

You may see that the biggest obstacle for having patience to get success is the mentality to compare yourself with others. This not only your problem, this is the problem of every human being.  We, as a human being are fundamentally impatience as we always compare ourselves to others. Each and every people are crossing their own milestones in their own manner, in their own situation. People have different goal in their lives, and surprisingly most of them do not have a clear idea about it. As a researcher or PhD student if you have a clear goal in your life then you should calculate approximately how much time it may take to reach to the goal and you should have a clear plan for that. If you have a clear plan then automatically you will have a clear time line and you will take action accordingly. Then you will not be impatient as you will know how much time is remaining to reach the goal. If you are smart enough to make a nice plan then you will never compare yourself with other, since you know you have different plan to reach to your goal.

What you will do after failures in the projects? First you should realize that failures are temporary. With time you will improve your skills required for the experiment or the project, you will read more research papers related to the project, you will take more useful notes from them and you will discuss your failures with experienced people to get clues to overcome it. You will do all these, as all these are included in your plan. So your plan should be robust and you should have tenacity to stick on it. Failures are like seasoning or training of your skills, so that you may improve on your skill, and may improve in such a way that you may be one of bests having these skills, which means you may become an expert, which will obviously help you to get a magnificent position in your professional field.

Disappointments for not having expected outcome after enormous effort is very common for a researchers, and it is accelerated when someone neighboring to you are having success with lesser effort. These disappointments are really toxic, because as I said comparison with others is the most self-devastating act for us. Do not make any competition with others, and this is the best way to improve you. You may not know your neighbor’s goal is not as big as yours. He/she may be happy with small millstones, with moderate publication, with moderate jobs or may not have a long term plan, but you have, you have big goal and you should focus on it and act properly to fulfill it. Bigger success needs bigger timeline, you cannot get best quality of mango within a few months, you have to nurture the tree for years, but when you will have patience you will be massively rewarded automatically. This is the system of success, and who follows it, ends it with a success.