Day 125: Patience: Another Virtue I Do Not Have

This morning I was thinking a lot about the fact that even as I get older, I don't seem to be getting more patient. In fact, I seem to grow more impatient about certain things.

I had always heard that as people got older, they started to become more patient and they just accept things (and people) as they are, even if they are slow or they just don't seem to get it.

Yet again, this is another thing that does not seem to happening for me as I age. And, one of the things that I am increasingly becoming impatient about is waiting for others to get my work or volunteer projects done. This is especially true because (with rare exceptions) I always finish my work on time/within schedule so that I don't keep others waiting. That's not to say I rush through my work to try to meet the deadline regardless of quality. It's just that I have even less patience for people who waste time and money, especially other people's time and money. It is actually one of my biggest pet peeves.

This is what I strive for

I also lose patience and become frustrated because I cannot relax until I know something is completed. I hate the feeling of something hanging out there, over my head. It might be due to the nature of writing and editing, i.e., there’s always a correction that can be made, things can always be rewritten better, and inevitably there's always some errant typo that rears its ugly head after you thought you were all done. 

And, I don't have final say-so, someone else does. After doing this for so long (even when I wrote or produced reports in my prior career), no matter what you write, whoever is the last to read it, be it an editor or, a boss who thinks they are an editor, they simply cannot resist the urge to change or "fix" something, no matter how small. Even if it is to change one word, or to add a comma, they cannot resist.

The other thing that makes it difficult to remain patient is when you tell somebody 3 or 4 times about the same change or the same mistake, and they just don't get it (i.e. 10 drafts of a newsletter because the graphic guy just doesn't seem to get "delete this").

Ah, but again I digress and am now wondering how this post in any way has anything to do with my goal of sharing or discovering something positive every day. It doesn't. But, it is something that I have learned and that I continue to learn. 

Maybe the real lesson is that I just need to be patient with my own impatience, and that because I always strive to be professional and considerate, wasting neither time nor money is actually a good thing. 

And, this is the reality :)!