Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Developing patience

Mr. Nordner's statement about patience struck a chord with me. As a kid it seemed like just about every adult I knew told me I had no patience. Looking back, well, it was true, but it did irritate me no end at the time. Especially since it's one thing to tell someone they have no patience, and another to suggest practical steps to developing it.

I'm reading Helen Dewitt's The Last Samurai, and in it there's a passage where the narrator notes that Yo-Yo Ma's father helped speed his son's development as a cellist by having him master one small thing a day, day after day. And I think it was also noted that this regime was imposed on the junior Ma when he was a toddler. I don't know if this is suitable for such a young child, or if this is all fiction, but the idea of continually mastering one small thing after another as a means of building up skills has merit. Maybe developing skills in this way is a way to develop patience in that having patience for a task has a component that is related to knowing the steps required to complete the task, and knowing that one has the skills to accomplish each step. Maybe.

I need to look into ways to develop model making patience. I still have problems with it, and putting up a sign near my work table that yells PATIENCE isn't going to do it :-)

2 comments:

  1. I have found a low-stress, enjoyable approach to building patience or any habitual practice in B.J. Fogg's 'Tiny Habits'. He has a channel on YouTube and there are many videos explaining this approach.

    But perhaps more helpful than the Tiny Habits approach itself is his motivation/action graph and the activation threshold. If a task is hard and we are highly motivated, we'll have no trouble doing it. Likewise, if it is easy and our motivation is low we can still cross the threshold into action. But a hard task with low motivation is a no-go zone without external stimulus.

    Make developing patience easy enough that even low motivation will allow you to begin, and you increase your odds of success. Add a reliable trigger or anchor and those odds go up even further.

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    1. Thanks! I need to check out his channel. I have found that hard projects that mean a lot to me are easier to focus on. The highrise has been easier to keep going - even though more-or-less everything on that project is new to me and outside my usual comfort zone - than a Wallace and Gromit build, a food truck, and Rommel's Rod that I have in various states of construction.

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