In general, I have found that people like to give advice.
They like to give you advice about your career, your friends, your goals…. the list is infinite. This is especially true when you are going through a life change, like graduating college.
When I graduated college the best advice that I received was, “Patience is a virtue, and it’s a virtue you want to have.”
I never realized how important patience was until I graduated college. During my college years, it felt like I never really needed patience because things were coming at me so fast that I could barely keep up. I made decisions fast, and that was okay because things were changing all the time.
Now that I’m out of school and in the real world, things are still changing fast, but I often feel impatient for the next step of my life to appear. With this impatience comes frustration and annoyance. What should I do next? Where am I going to live in the next year? When should I start applying for a new job? Being unable to answer these questions drives me absolutely insane, but then I remember that patience is a virtue.
Obviously this advice is not new, but I never really understood what it meant until recently.
“Patience means persevering in the face of delay or provocation without acting on annoyance/anger in a negative way, and a virtue is a positive trait or quality subjectively deemed to be morally excellent. Personal virtues are characteristics valued as promoting collective and individual greatness.” – These are both definitions I got off Wikipedia, and I think they’re pretty accurate (sorry college professors, but Wikipedia is here to stay).
Patience gives you a peace of mind, which allows you to make better decisions and therefore leads you to individual greatness.
Twenty-somethings these days are so impatient to take their life to the next level that they forget to enjoy the level that they are on right now. Almost all of my friends are constantly stressed out because they are impatient, and I have learned that I don’t want to be stressed out in my twenties. I’m pretty sure stress is meant for your thirties, and being fun and adaptable is meant for your twenties.
So twenty-somethings, please slow down and stop stressing out so much because all your stressing is stressing me out! Try to be patient, and I’m sure the next step in your life will fall at your feet sooner than you ever expected.
Photo uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons
