Patience and Purpose in the Pursuit of Personal Projects

April 2022

Sarah A. Schnitker
Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Baylor University

“What are your personal strengths and weaknesses?” is a common question posed to students in applications for admittance to programs, internships, or leadership positions culminating is the question being tendered when interviewing for jobs. Students tend to describe themselves with a plethora of virtues articulating their strengths, such as kindness, leadership, integrity, generosity, or perseverance, but tend not to describe their weakness in such virtue-based language. Yet, there is an exception to the rule. Deficient patience is commonly cited as a weakness. Students (and faculty for that matter) are quite comfortable discussing their lack of patience as a weakness with a positive twist; they are so driven and performance oriented that they don’t have time for patience. Patience is for slackers, which they are not.

Why do people love to hate on patience in this way in universities and the professions? And what are the implications of this attitude toward patience for the formation of student vocation and flourishing?

In my lab, we define patience as the ability remain calm in the face of frustration, adversity, and suffering in the pursuit of something good beyond the self. Derived from the Latin root pati, which means “to suffer” and which is further derived from the Latin sub– and ferre, which denote “from below or under” and “to bear,” patience entails being able to bear under the burdens of suffering with excellence. Why should such a virtue fall into ignominy? In his 1997 book, Patience: How We Wait Upon the World, moral theologian David Bailey Harned argues that patience has been conceptualized as an “outdated” virtue representing a “unimaginative failure of nerve” since the industrial revolution. People have come to equate patience with passivity. Arguably, the information revolution of the last few decades has only exacerbated the problem as technological advances have accelerated exponentially—further solidifying the assumption that suffering and waiting can be eradicated. Yet, as any person mildly attentive to news over the past few years knows, suffering and waiting have not disappeared. Instead, certain forms of suffering seem to be increasing – especially among college students, who are displaying unprecedented levels of anxiety and depressive symptomology.

Is the broad public assumption correct that we should cast patience aside because it is a form of passivity or inaction? Does patience mean capitulating to a negative state of affairs and giving up on the pursuits of a flourishing life? The psychological literature suggests the answer to this question is a resounding no. In addition to studies showing that patience is associated with enhanced well-being and decreased mental illness symptomology, research shows patience does not represent passivity, lack of assertiveness, or disengagement from important goal pursuits. Instead, our research suggests patience facilitates the adaptive pursuit of goals. In a 2017 study, we asked college students to list 10 personal projects (i.e., goals) they would be pursuing across the course of the academic quarter and rate the pursuit of each project on a variety of dimensions. We then had them re-evaluate their pursuit of their goals every two weeks, resulting in five measurement occasions. Using sophisticated analytic approaches, we were able to show that when students rated themselves as more patient in their pursuit of a particular project, they reported higher effort and greater goal achievement satisfaction in pursuit of that project two weeks later. Likewise, students were likely to employ more subsequent patience when they were effortfully pursuing a goal. Rather than undermining effortful goal pursuit, patience facilitated it.

Moreover, the purpose or meaning behind the goal matters for patience, and patience can buffer against existential crises. In our model of college students’ goal pursuit, we found that when goals where more meaningful, students were more likely to report patience in their pursuit two weeks later, and when students were pursuing goals with patience, those goals became more meaningful. In a 2021 study looking at the function of virtues among individuals hospitalized at a psychiatric inpatient facility, we found that patience and gratitude buffered the deleterious effects of existential crises on suicide risk. It is commonly found that spiritual struggles related to existential questions of meaning and purpose in life are robust predictors of elevated suicide risk. However, this association was attenuated by high patience and gratitude in our study; these virtues allowed people to suffer existential concerns without the same resultant increase in suicidality. Given that suicide ranks among the top three causes of death among adolescents and young adults, the evidence that virtues may serve as protective factors is essential information for educators. Together, these studies (and others) show that purpose and patience co-facilitate each other, and patience may be an essential strength when people are questioning their life purpose.

Thus, despite broad cultural assumptions that lack of patience is a strength that is masquerading as a weakness, it is worthwhile to instill in our students that patience is actually a virtue that facilitates the achievement of goals, provides purpose, and supports a flourishing life.

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