Patience, The Most Valuable Commodity

in #money7 years ago (edited)

source: Fine Art America

Value is the concept that manifests itself when a group of people decide to compare one thing with another. Although it has a highly speculative nature, it can be transferred, exchanged or destroyed. All human endeavors entail at least some aspect of value. Nonetheless, the virtue of patience stands diachronically as the mother of all value (whether that is social, intellectual or financial).

Now, I am not going to bother you with technicalities about short term and long term valuations. Let's just say that the most traditional form of valuation is the small interest we receive by letting money sit in our bank account. The percentage we generate is small but it carries less risk due to its long term leverage. On the other hand, if we invest in some high risk - high reward stocks (that probably shady uncle Bob suggested), we run into the danger of losing our money. This is how patience generates value for one while the opposite takes it away.


Human societies have been increasing capital since the dawn of civilization. Thing is, most us are not good with capital valuation because we are impatient. Our lives are too short and our emotions volatile. When we are presented with an opportunity we prefer to take what’s on the table and run away rather than have patience and let value grow.

Whether we talk about intellectual or social values the same principle of patience applies. If we wait and let all those volumes of information fill our brains, our intellect will increase in time. It might not be a linear growth but it will increase. Same applies to social value. Good friends are build over time and that requires immense amounts of patience in order to really get to know and bond with someone.

It might not be clear yet, but in regards to blockchain technologies long term investors have the upper hand. Part of the reason is that the cryptosphere has traditionally attracted short-term speculators with some form of gambling background. Although some of them might have been favored when the volume was relatively low, in a bull market they end up working for the patience long-term players. It is no wonder that most flipity-flippers used to have thousands of Bitcoin and/or Ethereum but ended up trading them for a quick buck. They would be retired by now if they had self-restraint.


Patience is a very peculiar virtue to master because it involves emotional maturity. Impatient people are often superstitious, fearful and unstable, ending up making the same mistakes over and over again. The emotional vicious cycle keeps them trapped in their own addictions. Patience also goes against our very nature since humans are not designed to be rational but rather instinctual. Children are impatient for the very reason that they can’t contain their emotions. The environment overwhelms them due to inexperience. Unfortunately, most people never grow up and maintain the same pattern as small children.

Anxiety is believed to be the plague of modern civilization. I believe part of the reason is that we want to tip our finger to everything around us... yesterday. As a result our bodies retaliate against us. A panic attack after all is nothing other than the mind running ahead from the body. Impatience in all its glory.


I would suggest to anyone to try and do everything in their power to cultivate the virtue of patience. It is quite hard to master since modern society requires individuals that are on a constant state of flux. We are all riddled with FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) for just about everything. Assuming that civilization won’t collapse anytime soon, those who can champion patience are guaranteed to have an edge over their restless peers.







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Patience in a virtue my friend.

^^^UPVOTED^^^

Keep the good posts coming!!!

Bro, very very well said. Patience is the key thing missing from ME right now. I know this. I've been saying the word patience a lot to my mentors, partners, customers for the past week or two.

It's like some benevolent force is trying to nudge me towards my self-discovery. @Kyriacos, you're part of the beacon guiding me, brother!

I'm off to do a live cryptoconsult and talk about how Steemit is the "proof" that crypto can go mainstream, and when we're successful (just a matter of time), it will.

Seriously though, I'm hording shitcoins that I beileve in right now and if I see a 100% return, I need to be strong enough to HODL. I do like to day trade, but I do that with only like 3-5% of my total stake... that way my long term investments aren't always exposed.

good strategy.

If you live in a city or work in a big corporate environment you quickly realise that everything must happen NOW. Everything must be done in record time but you must still provide quality work with no mistakes or else…

This used to get to me but recently I started to sit back and take a few deep breaths, put some music on and do the work on my own time. This is much better on my health.

Same thing happened to me while I was living in New York. The fast pace of life made years fly by without me even realizing it.

The lovely rat race. You have to take time out for yourself and family. I have to get out of the city every once in a while to get away from it and clear my mind. Going into nature with shoes off and feet on the ground with no technology is the best advice for recharging batteries.

absolutely, otherwise you remain a cog in the machine.......and it ain't your machine you're working for......

Totally see where you're coming from. Great read, thanks

You are welcome

Nice reminder. We all need "just a little patience." What a virtue to have and one that leads to better understanding and better success. I find myself within the days of my reality struggling a bit here and there looking for something to help with it's, among many other things, monotony and all I'll need to do is refer to this post. Nice one. Enjoyed.

Read yours and it inspired me to write my own. Thank you for that! Love your content.

That was a very well written article, hands down!
Patience is a virtue which we lack in today's society. Everything that happens need to happen yesterday. We are caught up in fast money, faster traffic, faster food etc that we forget to actually pay attention to what is going on.

This is a good topic to shed some light on, to raise the awareness about things like this.

This is why i never liked living in the city, everything is happening so fast and moving quickly I really can't get any "downtime" and just take things my phase, the only solution was to move back to the country!

Cheers!

well said. thank you

In France, they have something called Faster Food. It always puzzles me. If there's faster food, then there must be Fastest Food. What about slow food?

Rush to wait. Wait to rush. Such is life.

Patience doesn't mean a week or a month , something's require a lot more patience and the reward is always bigger as well .

These days everyone just wants the fastest way out but how does one actually benefit from it ? When you wait to learn a lot more and I guess you're more calm too (in the end)

You start at a week? Oh boy, i don't even have 1 day patience :p

Haha , you know what I meant :D

You hit the nail on the head! Patience is so important to have nowadays. It helps to have a better mood and coincides with less stress, which has many negative effects on the body. There's a reason they say "Patience is a virtue." Thanks for the article :)

You are welcome :)

The driving force of blockchain is the impatience of the ADD/ADHD culture. Not trying to disparage the condition or symptoms, but it seems like more and more people want to see things done immediately and have no ability to 'wait and see'.

Today's children will never know what it was like taking 6 hours to download 1 song from some random website, only to find out that you were missing the last 50 seconds from the song. : | Anyone remember Go!Zilla?

oh yes

I remember 9600bps modem. I remeber go!zilla and some other "accelerators". The time when there wasn't not so much sex and ads everywhere. Now almost every website is full of ads that even makes it hard to read anything without popups and ads between paragraphs. Glad that steemit is free that shit.

This was an excellent post that was very well written. My issue is that for certain things I am way too patient but with other things going on my life I am too impatient. While patience is a virtue, too much patience can potentially be a vice adding credence to the old saying too much of a good thing can be bad for you. I usually find it hard to strike a balance to find the correct amount of patience in my own life.

The dreaded balance. Always hunts un with everything