Musings at Altitude

Throughout my business life (actually throughout my entire life), I’ve struggled with patience.  When I see things that need to be done, I’d like them to get done or at least move forward toward being done immediately.  When I see a path that needs to be taken (at least from my perspective), I can’t understand why that path isn’t immediately taken.  When I see an obvious answer to any problem or any challenge, I want to immediately address that problem or respond to that challenge in the way that seems obvious.  For some who know me (my wife comes to mind first), they would agree that I am impatient, but they’d immediately offer their input as to how right I might be in the path I sense should be taken or the resolution I may be pushing to solve for any particular problem.  In fact, in one of my more outspoken sessions of complaining to my wife about my frustration with some insanity at work and a failure to take a particularly obvious path (this was many years ago), she quickly responded, “you’re absolutely right…wouldn’t the world be so much better if everyone thought just like you.”  That shut me up!

But I am by nature very impatient.  I like things constantly moving forward.  I like things constantly changing.  I’m a big fan of the “Ready, Fire, Aim” mentality, and I get seriously bored in any lengthy planning process.  In software development, I’m a big fan of RAD – Rapid Application Development.  It seems to get something exciting and meaningful much faster.  In business, I’m most stoked when you have only months to do a multi-year job or when you have a seriously significant deadline with severe business consequence if it’s not pulled off – the time intensity of both of these then makes planning a parallel process with significant urgency that folks can’t spend any time pondering during any part of the planning cycles.

My lack of patience in most things related to business has caused many people to call me “flighty”, “not committed”, “high risk”, “unfocused”, and even “foolish”.  At various times, I probably couldn’t argure with any of those.  In fact, I could probably give you an example of each one of these as I look back over the last 25 years of my life in both the military and in the commercial world.  But even though I wouldn’t argue in looking at specific examples, I think I would argue that desiring movement, or desiring change, or desiring aggressive growth when those are the principle causes of a lack of patience doesn’t naturally point to a risky or unfocused or foolish approach to business.  In fact, I’d argue that you should give me a team full of just such risky, unfocused and foolish people, then match those with a couple of mission focused check and balancers, and we could make some wonderful business success happen.

But I wasn’t thinking about business when I started thinking about patience – or that lack of patience that I have.   Instead, I was thinking about a recent lesson given to me by my Dad concerning patience.  As I typically do, when I get a bit frustrated by life and I feel my lack of patience getting to a point where I might make irrational decisions, I call my Dad, and he’s great at listening.  He’ll let me vent and when I’m done he’ll always pull out some gem of wisdom that I spend days then pondering and internalizing.  That happened recently when I was on a long drive and needed to vent so I called home.  I told my Dad about the frustrations I was experiencing, and how I was praying hard for patience.  I talked about how God wired me with that knee jerk reaction mentality and how I was struggling with knowing if that strong desire to change (in anything) was based on God’s will for what I should do or based on my own selfish desires to just change. After letting me vent for quite a few miles my Dad said, “you shouldn’t pray for patience, but wisdom, for wisdom precedes patience.” We went on to talk about several more things and then my Dad asked, “can you give me one example in the Bible where a lack of patience was used as an example of good by God?” He mentioned Abraham and Sara who got impatient and took matters into their own hands. He mentioned Jacob and his mother who also got impatient and took matters into their own hands. In those cases and many more, a lack of patience (and maybe a lack of trust in the promised outcome) got folks in trouble when they decided to act rather than patiently allowing God’s plan to be played out. Fortunately, God fulfills His promises in spite of our lack of patience (or lack of trust), but my Dad’s point was well made – I shouldn’t believe that God made me to be impatient. Instead, I should pray for the wisdom that only God can provide and then through that wisdom gain patience.

Not one to ignore the incredible advice of my Dad, I’ve been praying hard for wisdom lately.  I can’t say that I feel any more patient since I’ve changed the focus of my prayers, but I can say that when I feel impatient I do pray for wisdom a lot harder!  Just to reinforce what my Dad told me, I started reading the book of James this morning, in a translation called “The Message”.  In the introductory comments to the verses, the authors said, “prayer is foundational to wisdom.”  Earlier, they had said, “wisdom is not primarily knowing the truth, although it certainly includes that; it is skill in living.   For, what good is a truth if we don’t know how to live it?  What good is an intention if we can’t sustain it.” 

So I’ll keep praying for wisdom, and hopefully through my prayers I’ll also find patience.