NO PATIENCE?

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Technology has made so many things faster—microwaves, ATMs, jet aircraft, processed foods, satellites, email. Technology has made us the fast society—two-minute noodles, one-hour photo processing, 24-hour loan approvals. At this rate, can we be far from a home study course called "Teach Yourself Brain Surgery in 12 Days"? Since so many things take so little time, when something or someone slows us down, we lose our patience, quickly.

Most people today live in cities and towns, not on farms. Very few people are involved in raising animals or growing crops—activities that inherently require patience. It's easy to imagine a city worker impatient with a train being five minutes late. It's hard to imagine a farmer being impatient because his calves aren't becoming cows fast enough or because his summer crop isn't ready to harvest in springtime.

Another reason patience is becoming rarer in our society is because of the way we link achievement and success with personal worth. For us, to fail at an activity means to fail as a person. But that hasn't always been the case. In other times and other places, failure in an activity meant the opportunity to learn something new, to try again, and to experiment or try another approach, an opportunity to grow and mature. Most of the great scientists of the past—such as Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, and Einstein—are great examples of this. Their contributions didn't come in one flash of inspiration, but over decades of patient work with as many failures as successes. Our society says, "Succeed and succeed now!' There is no time to be patient and persistent. In truth, we need these qualities to ultimately be successful.

Amazon


Autonomic Computing
Autonomic Computing
ISBN: 013144025X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 254
Authors: Richard Murch

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