Be Persistent and Impatient
I’m fascinated by people who work unabashedly towards a difficult goal, especially when there’s little chance of external reward or motivation.
When I wrote The Happiness of Pursuit, I went on a hunt to find people who had pursued a quest. I was in the last stage of my own quest to visit every country in the world, and by then I’d heard from all sorts of people with different challenges they’d chosen to tackle.
Whether it’s walking across Turkey or living in a treehouse for a year, the motivation has to come from within. You have to want it! If there’s any other motivation, you aren’t going to get very far.
As I saw it then, the qualities of a quest include:
- A clear objective—a quest has a beginning and an end
- Milestones of progress along the way
- A clear sense of challenge and difficulty
- The person undertaking the quest (the “hero,” we might as well call them) ends up being changed along the way
I recently stumbled upon an article that made me think. It was about Scott Ross, an American musician who lived most of his life in France and specialized in the harpsichord, a difficult instrument to master.*
More on this: I’d imagine you’d have to be very patient to master the harpsichord, but perhaps not for Scott.
At one point before his premature death—he died of AIDS thirty years ago at the age of 38—he set out to record the masterwork of the harpsichord oeuvre.
What was that, you ask? Cumulatively, it’s known as the Scarlatti sonatas: a collection of 555 compositions, each in two parts.
No one had done this before. In fact, there wasn’t even a complete recording of the full set by a group of performers. When Scott proposed that he do it, his idea was seen as a joke … at first.
Of course, it wasn’t a joke, and he did it. The final project took 98 studio sessions and 8,000 takes over the course of 15 months.
This herculean undertaking made even more harrowing by the fact that Scott had begun to feel the symptoms of his terminal illness. Nevertheless, as they say, he persisted.
My favorite part of the article that recounts his biography includes this quote at the end:
“I have a quality — a vice, perhaps,” he says. “It’s called perseverance, which isn’t the same thing as patience. Patience I don’t possess, but perseverance? You’re talking to someone who recorded 555 Scarlatti sonatas. Well, that didn’t require any patience. I have no patience for anything whatsoever.”
So there you have it: patience is overrated. But perseverance? Now that has some value.
I connect deeply with the “perseverance, not patience” worldview. By the time my own quest came to an end, I was ready—but if I had to, I could have kept going.
People often asked me what I would do if more countries came along. Thing is, that doesn’t happen very often—the last time was South Sudan in 2011 (and yes, I’ve been there). But in a hypothetical world where the authorities suddenly decided there were 250 countries instead of 193, I would have dutifully packed up and headed out again.
Yet, like Scott, I too am not very patient. I tend to get frustrated with myself and anyone else I’m around (sorry, everyone).
Like most mental models, the perseverance–not-patience concept is not universal. No doubt there are plenty of examples of people who’ve been patient and able to persevere.
It just strikes me that many of the ambitious people I’ve studied have been quite impatient, like Scott Ross, yet they’ve also found a way to keep going and going, getting up when they’re knocked down, and eventually making it to their final sonata.
If that’s you, well, keep going! We need you to record some sonatas.
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