Building patience by managing complexity

You build patience by increasing your ability to handle greater levels of complexity in things outside of your control.

"Dui, I just like things resolved right away!"

My friend had said he liked things resolved right away, and I had a hard time articulating my problem with his stance.

I talked about the virtue of patience, and how most hard and valuable things in life take time. I knew my friend was being impatient; it was something simple he was waiting for, a quote from a mechanic or something, but I couldn't quite put my finger on my objection.

"I learned to be fast and efficient like this with my manager before I retired, an American. He said drawers are bad; they make you store work instead of doing them." – I couldn't argue with that, either; it seemed like a good principle, based on Lean. I liked the drawer both as metaphor for backlogs and as tactical advice for managerial work from the 80s to nowadays.

But the quote that would come to mind analyzing his situation was Epictetus' Enchiridion, N.15:

Chapter 15
Remember to act always as if you were at a symposium. When the food or drink comes around, reach out and take some politely; if it passes you by don’t try pulling it back. And if it has not reached you yet, don’t let your desire run ahead of you, be patient until your turn comes. Adopt a similar attitude with regard to children, wife, wealth and status, and in time, you will be entitled to dine with the gods.

Epictetus. Discourses and Selected Writings (Penguin Classics) (p. 265). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

I always loved the translator's use of "politely" in "reach out and take some politely;" – the contrasting image of those who reach out and take some politely, displaying self-control, versus the ones who don't.

"Reach out and take some politely" – what a quote!

We parted ways, eventually my friend got his mechanic's quote, and all was well. But it bugged me.

What was the problem I had with his stance?

Only later did I realize what the difference between the mechanic's quote and the manager's drawer piling work was:

The difference was whether it was him or other people who were being rushed to do the work.

Impatience and collaboration

Sometimes impatience can be mistaken for ambition, and patience for lethargy, so here's a definition of impatience to clarify what I mean:

Impatience is the tendency to be easily frustrated or restless when faced with delays, difficulties, or situations that require waiting or persistence. It often involves a desire for immediate results or quick resolutions and a reluctance to endure discomfort or inconvenience. Impatient people may struggle with tolerance for things that require time, patience, or effort, and they may become agitated or annoyed when things don’t happen as quickly as they would like.

Impatience, and its feelings of frustration, restlessness, agitation, and annoyance, won't lead to sustainable top performance, so it's a poor tool for collaboration.

Looking at the opposite of this definition, you have the virtue of not being easily frustrated, persistence, desire for long-term results, enduring discomfort, and embracing effort.

Patience.

A lack of patience hinders collaboration in a myriad ways: it undermines psychological safety, incentivizes collaborators to take shortcuts without considering results, conveys a lack of support, rewards others to avoid the impatient person in the future, among other things.

In order to develop competencies, our ability to change real-world results, we must work with others. Our competence depends on effective collaboration.

To understand where to apply our patience and our effort, we must clarify our locus of control.

Locus of control as target for action

You know Rube Goldberg machines? Those contraptions where you drop a domino, and after a series of elaborate mechanisms involving thrown balls, water filling buckets, and little carts driving by, it finally blows out a candle?

Collaboration is often like that: to blow out the candle, you must drop the domino and let the machine do its work.

Most impatience happens in situations when you're trying to blow the candle directly instead of dropping the domino.

You see, our locus of control can be quite ambiguous. This ambiguity over our locus of control, after all, is the premise around which pretty much all of Stoicism is built, and we're still working on it 2,500 years later.

Since you're not a Stoic, finding the domino is enough for you. Think about the actions that trigger the chain of results, and focus on the actions you can take.

• Want to get stronger? Focus on going to the gym.
• Want to get healthier? Focus on what you choose to eat.
• Want to get wealthier? Focus on learning about investments.
• Want to be better at X? Focus on practicing X.

All roads lead to Rome. While different actions will lead to different results, for now the focus is not on the best results but on performing actions within your control: training, practicing, learning, choosing.

The rest, the results, is up to how the machine plays it out.

But how to delevop this patience? This ability to wait?

The discomfort of complexity

I was chatting with a friend once about cars. We used to have the same car, and he had recently traded up his car.

"Dui, this new new car is great! It's so comfortable! It's a whole different level of comfort. I really recommend it."

To which I replied:

"That's cool! I'm glad you're happy. You see, I actually traded down my new car. In general, I'm trying to find ways to make myself less comfortable, not more, and I think a bad car is a good exercise in that."

My friend was stumped for a bit, then I think understood, and we moved on to other topics. But the principle of deliberately pursuing discomfort is an important one.

While you don’t necessarily need to get an old car with a window crank – one that might come off in your hand while cranking, as mine did – shifting your mindset from ‘comfort is good and discomfort is bad’ to ‘comfort is bad and discomfort is good’ is sure to help you build patience.

I'm reminded of a passage in Josh Waitzkin's The Art of Learning, where he talks about building the ability to navigate complex chess boards and resisting the temptation of trading pieces to simplify the position as a competitive advantage. He calls it "maintaining the tension."

Grandmasters know how to make the subtlest cracks decisive. The only thing to do was become immune to the pain, embrace it, until I could work through hours of mind-numbing complexities as if I were taking a lovely walk in the park. The vise, after all, was only in my head. I spent years working on this issue, learning how to maintain the tension — becoming at peace with mounting pressure. Then, as a martial artist, I turned this training to my advantage, making my opponents explode from mental combustion because of my higher threshold for discomfort.

Waitzkin, Josh. The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance (pp. 171-172). Free Press. Kindle Edition.

Valuing discomfort has a similar effect on our day-to-day lives. You start looking for ways to build inner comfort in uncomfortable situations, instead of releasing the tension for outer comfort.

Impatience often comes from this discomfort in complexity. The open threads. The overwhelm. The lack of control over all the moving pieces, life jerking us around like a ragdoll.

Then they add yet another thing, one more thing to your already full plate, and you snap.

But how to push through, or even embrace this complexity and the discomfort it creates?

How do you, like Josh Waitzkin, embrace maintaining the tension?

Keep building your game

Marcelo Garcia is one of the best Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioners of all time. He's also Josh Waitzkin's BJJ professor.

In an interview a decade ago, Marcelo talked about his decision to record and post online all of his training sessions in preparation for no-gi BJJ's biggest competition, and his lack of concern for opponents using it to study his "game." Paraphrased:

Oh, I don't care about opponents watching me train. If they see positions they wanna try on me, then they're in my game. If they're in my game, whoever plays my game better wins. And I'm the best one in my game.

Like Marcelo, you must deal with complexity and tension by making it your game. If you're in your game, you're home and you win. If you're not in your game, you're away and you lose.

I'm not a big believer in "false" confidence, in pretending we can deal with the problem when we can't. Fake it 'til you make it. Instead, just like when you're first trying to learn a new language and everything sounds intractable, remember that this language that's hard for you is incredibly easy for a native speaker, and keep learning.

Complexity is not just something that exists out there, but a function of what's out there and your current ability to manage it.

You can ease this discomfort one of two ways: by making it simpler or by building your ability to manage even more complex things.

This means building your game. Not coincidentally, most actions within your control are about building your game and not about directly controlling the outcomes of the match.

Coming back to our Rube Goldberg machine analogy where tumbling a domino eventually blows a candle, building your game means becoming a master of dropping the domino: the angles, the velocity, the timing, the types of dominos.

That’s how you become a patient candle blower: by mastering the art of tumbling the dominos.

That's where you must focus your pursuit.

Embrace the complexity out there, that's outside your control. Let the machine play. Wait.

Address the ability in there, that's within your control. Master the tumbling of the domino. Act.