Why You Can’t Be Productive If You Have No Patience (Plus: 3 Principles To Live By)

People are more impatient than ever.

But I’ve been impatient my whole life. I used to hate waiting for anything. I blame my Dad. He started me on my impatience journey when he taught me how to flick back and forth between television channels to try and avoid commercials.

Everybody wants instant gratification.

We seek immediate dopamine hits because endless opportunities exist to ignite the high.

Our obsession leaks into every domain of our lives and blurs together with things that must take time.

Some of the most important things require consistent, persistent, and patient action every day — like building experience in a profession or learning a skill.

To maximize productivity, you need to learn to accept these three patience principles:

Develop a taste for having problems.

“A life devoid of problems would contain nothing worth doing, and would therefore be meaningless,” writes Luke Burgis in his must-read book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.

We must give up the unrealistic goal of eradicating all problems or viewing problems as a bad thing. Once you break free…