Everyday Ambassador by Kate Otto

Author:Kate Otto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

PATIENCE: HIGH SPEED IS NOT HIGH IMPACT

Rawera ringo matek kende owuon, kod jaduong’ gidhi mos to kanyakla gichopo mabor.

(Alone a youth runs fast, with an elder slow, but together they go far.)

—Luo Proverb

Patience has become an increasingly uncommon trait as we get sucked into a world of instant gratification and immediate updates. Why read a newspaper when we can swiftly scroll through summarized headlines? Why read a full article when we can do a search and zoom in only on the keywords of interest to us? Why trek to the store for a purchase when there’s same-day delivery online? Time is valuable, and the apps that populate our smartphone screens empower us to live more conveniently and efficiently, even if, consequently, more impatiently. With our bus schedules, weather reports, taxi requests, and restaurant reviews being so immediately, reliably accessible, it has become unacceptable to have to wait for anything.

But this impatience is not the good kind of impatience that has fueled social change leaders to take urgent and dramatic actions against injustice. It’s the draining kind of impatience that diminishes the value of anything noninstantaneous down to not worth waiting for. Many digital aficionados treat a slow Wi-Fi connection in a corner café, or being put on hold by a customer service representative as gross human rights violations. Comedian Louis C.K. joked about our society’s chronic impatience when he described a flight on which the airline offered Wi-Fi, but when it stopped working, a fellow passenger became immediately frustrated. “How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only ten seconds ago!” he observed. 1

Mocking our impatience is funny because it is real, and we see it every day. But beyond our behavior lie serious consequences, including the erosion of interpersonal communication skills and healthy relationships. Technology might work quickly and simply, but human beings notoriously do not. Being impatient waiting for a taxi to appear is one thing, but what happens when we start feeling impatient waiting for a friend’s text message reply, a boss’s email, or the first like or comment on a Facebook post? If our appreciation for efficiency and speed in technology sinks too deeply into our nature, we run the risk of treating other people with brash, abrasive, or passive-aggressive attitudes, whether it’s a customer service representative, a loved one, or ourselves.

Patience is not only a saving grace in relationship management, but it’s also a skill that allows us to do better work, even if (or perhaps because) we must work more slowly. In 2013, the Pew Research Center’s famed Internet & American Life Project surveyed teachers of students in advanced placement courses, the cream of America’s academic crop, and 68 percent of these teachers said digital tools make students more likely to take shortcuts and not put effort into their writing. Almost half of them, 46 percent, claimed these tools make students more likely to “write too fast and be careless.” 2 If this is happening with our highest-ranking students, what else might

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