Saint Mary's Newsroom

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again,

Because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause;

Who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly…”

This famous quote, is from Theodore Roosevelt’s speech “Citizenship in a Republic” on April 23, 1910. Recently brought back to our attention in the writings of Brené Brown’s New York Times bestseller “Daring greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead,” offers insight to the importance of patience, perseverance, and resilience when pursing “high achievement;” for our purposes, the process of completing a dissertation. (Interestingly, this speech was delivered at The Sorbonne, a University in Paris where the founder of the Lasalllian schools, St. John Baptiste De Lasalle, had studied in 1670-1672.)

In a Lasalllian educational approach, patience is presented as one of the twelve virtues of a good teacher. Patience is a virtue that helps us “overcome” the challenges of life; including those challenges in our teaching, research, and writing. As the Roosevelt quote suggests, it is the very act of continuing to respond to challenge, with good spirit, resolve, critical and flexible thinking, and a continued focus toward positive progress that is where we are flourishing in a state of “flow” and at our best.

Conducting original research and writing a dissertation is a lengthy process. We (the faculty) hope the process also is transformative to your thinking. This transformation brings change, process, and challenges. You must orchestrate the many variables of methodology, participants, data collection, statistics and analysis, interpretation, writing in APA, and of course, scheduling time for and understanding commentary and feedback from your committee members. Students sometimes ask us, “How fast can I write a dissertation?” After cringing, our general answer is: “The real question you should ask is ‘how can I write a dissertation well?’” I think both Theodore Roosevelt and St. John Baptiste De Lasalle would agree with our approach to dissertation writing: engage fully in the process, commit yourself to a worthy cause in research, and dare greatly.

Brown, B. (2012). Daring greatly: How courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent and
lead. New York, NY: Gotham 978-1-592-40733-0.

It is no secret; patience is a virtue. Many children’s parables inform us of the need for patience. Some of us may even be familiar with the famous marshmallow experiment conducted over 40 years ago. The lesson is, if we wait and follow directions, we will receive a just reward.

Br. Agathon illuminates the importance of patience. He asserts that it affords us the capacity to overcome trammels. He continues by espousing that patience is not only essential for promoting human flourishing, but it also affords us the ability to overcome our trials and ills. In the context of teaching, Br. Agathon reminds us not to despair when engaging with a recalcitrant student. By demonstrating patience and other fruitful virtues, the young person may imbibe the positive character traits. There is no debate; patience helps to promote an engaging classroom as well as a flourishing community.

However, Aristotle avows the need to adjudicate various virtues by exhibiting phronesis or practical wisdom. He acknowledges the value inherent in the various virtues, but suggests true human flourishing rests with the ability to leverage various virtues in a sagacious manner. As such, the author will briefly explore the intersection of patience and social justice.

Social justice is the substrate of one of the five Lasallian core principles. It prods us not to ignore the voices of the marginalized, and not to abscond from the cries of the victims of physical and economic violence. Social justice is the voice in our hearts and minds encouraging us to engage in assisting the historically disenfranchised. We are called to do so because social justice helps to promote human flourishing.

At the finish line of social justice, every child, regardless of color, creed, or economic beginnings is gifted with the ability to realize her or his fullest potential. If this is so, how can we be patient in the presence of social injustice? How can we take pleasure in saying, things are getting better? Is it wise to celebrate our probity as we say to ourselves, look how far we have come? How is less brutality a virtue? A wise man alluded to the analogy, if you stick a knife in my back 10 inches and remove it by six inches that is not progress.

Patience has its place as it is one of the virtues of a flourishing society. However, phronesis is a meta-virtue that allows us to consider context, and based on the contours of our reality, it informs us which virtue to call on. As it pertains to the current and historic crimes against humanity, it would seem only logical that social justice should take precedence. In the miasma of our existential reality, we should put the virtue of patience on the shelf and leverage our core values to help promote human flourishing.

Why is the microwave so slow? Why is traffic so slow? Why is my computer so slow? I wish things were faster.

For many, patience may be in short supply. This is probably why there are such things as road rage, snapping at others, and getting frustrated easily. When many of us hear the word patience, the ancient saying “patience is a virtue” comes to mind. Also, a gut reaction for many is, “I don’t have patience.” The consequence of being impatient is often bad decisions. However, we have the power to increase our patience. It is only a matter of choice.

Ironically in today’s fast-paced world, it seems we are pushed to embrace an impatient attitude. Impatience often conveys a sense of importance, busyness, urgency, etc. If we do not act with impatience, we are seen as slackers or having a lackadaisical attitude. And, since time is money, we therefore can’t be trusted to get the job done in a timely manner. To avoid this label, impatience is often worn as a badge of honor. Many of us have said or heard colleagues say, “I’m up to my eyeballs in work.” While this may be true for some, we should strive to practice more patience because many hasty decisions often yield disastrous results and many regrets.

In this essay, I will share with you my relationship with patience and how I developed it. In a previous essay, I mentioned I like gardening. This hobby started before I was ten. I can remember helping my mom plant seeds and she would tell me how many days they would take to germinate. Now, many seeds take a few days to germinate, but I can remember taking a small twig and digging up the seeds the very next day. Seeing no germination I would rebury them. The next day or two I would dig them up again. This time, I may see the roots sprouting, but the process of digging them up would damage the roots of many seeds. As a result, the vibrancy of the plant was compromised.

I did the same thing when we planted potatoes. From the time the potato “seeds” are planted, it takes about 70-120 days to harvest mature potatoes. Well, as a child, I was not prepared to wait that long. Within the first week, I was digging up the seeds to see if they were growing. Most likely, this negatively affected the development of the plant. As soon as the plant grew and looked mature to me, I would dig away at the roots to see if there were any potatoes. In my impatience, I was destroying the roots needed to develop a successful crop.

In the first 50 days in the life of a potato, nothing much happens in terms of development. The plant is spending lots of energy growing foliage to capture energy from the sun and sending feeder roots out to capture the nutrients from the surrounding soil. It is only after the leaves and roots are developed that the plant will use them to develop the potatoes. The healthier the plant, the greater the capacity it has to store energy in the form of potatoes. Most of the development of potatoes takes place in the last three weeks.

So, when my impatience got the better of me and I dug up the plants to see how the potatoes were developing, I was actually sabotaging my efforts and the subsequent potato crop. The learning for me was patience will yield great results. However, it was necessary to do the ground work and properly prepare the soil in a sunny location before planting the potato seeds. After care include pulling weeds, watering, checking for bugs, and a few months of patiently waiting, a huge crop awaits harvesting. Even a few weeks too soon could reduce the yield by more than 50 percent. Patience does bear dividends.

Over the years, my patience has been well rewarded with many great potato crops. Digging potatoes is also one of my biggest gardening joys. So much so, that I have invited many people to my garden to experience the joy of harvesting fully-grown potatoes. To me, in addition to a sense of achievement, it is the anticipation of what will be harvested. It is the culmination of patiently waiting for the plant to do its thing. This is very different from flowers, and things that grow above ground where you can see the progress of flowers and fruits.

The process of planting potatoes and patiently waiting has been reinforced over the decades. So, today, to summon my patience gene all I have to do is think of waiting patiently for rewards and not allow my impatience to destroy the very thing I want. For example, in relationships our impatience with people is often what destroys our connection with them.

From an academic perspective, the concept of waiting can be explained using emotional intelligence (EQ). Two of the major components of EQ are self-awareness and self-management. The former is being aware of one’s emotions. The latter is effectively managing them. In managing emotions, one must be aware of one’s beliefs, values, and assumptions. These are the things that drive behavior. Therefore, it is crucial to become self-aware of these things. By changing your beliefs, values, and assumptions via self-management, you will change your behaviors.

In closing, I wish you well as you develop your EQ and become better at mastering your impatient impulses. Patience does yield great dividends.

My dissertation is on EQ. If you are interested in learning more about the subject, please feel free to contact me.

A few days ago a colleague of mine, recently retired, concluded an email with “Be Water, My Friends,” an adage made famous by the actor and martial artist Bruce Lee. I know little about Bruce Lee, but reading these words at that specific time, one of change and uncertainty for many of us, resonated with me. Taking a break from my long “to do” list, I did a little research and came across this quote, which deepened my understanding of his philosophy:

“Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.” – Bruce Lee

Life today is marked by both unpredictability and impatience. We find it difficult to wait for an answer, whether that’s an email from a coworker or the results of a national election. In uncertain times, one response is to become rigid, to enforce structure on our days in an attempt to regain control, or perhaps to prove our worth. Although I won’t attempt to capture the complexity of Lee’s philosophy, it serves as a welcome reminder to be open and adaptable in the midst of change and even chaos.

The importance of adaptability even relates to the small, yet surprisingly challenging task of writing this newsletter post. I embarked with a sense of what I thought my readers expected of me: I would compose a neatly written essay on patience and the writing process, with takeaways applicable to writing in the DBA program and particularly the dissertation. I became frustrated when I was uninspired to write this imagined article. Unlike water, which changes form and has no expectations of what it will encounter, I was rigidly attached to my original plan. And despite teaching students to embrace the messiness of writing–as Anne Lamott puts it, our “shitty first drafts.” I struggled with impatience, not understanding why I grasped for words of wisdom. I know the frustration of spending hours putting words to paper, only to use a fraction of that work. At such points, including this one, I remind myself that writing is thinking–it is through writing that we develop our ideas, arrive at new realizations, and begin to form a cogent narrative.

To illustrate, an openness to Bruce Lee’s water metaphor helped me tap into my intuition and ultimately, if circuitously, arrive at my original topic of patience and writing. For those writing the dissertation, specifically, you may have a plan for your research question, methods, even your timeline to completion. While having a plan is wise and necessary, expect to encounter forks in the road ahead of you. On my own path to the dissertation, I faced unforeseen challenges that required me to change my topic and advisor; what helped me remain centered and motivated was a conviction that there are many good dissertations (after all, a good dissertation is a done dissertation), and that the unexpected obstacles were themselves an integral, even required, part of earning a doctorate that would only prepare me to meet future challenges. It has just now occurred to me that the times when I became like water were among my most productive and enriching, as a student of writing and as a student of life.

Meet Patience:

Patience eventually arrives for class, and sits unnoticed in the back. She shares a table with Peace.

She’s a great listener. You feel heard. You feel valued. You feel appreciated.

She is selfless.

Patience practices her presentations until they are timed perfectly. Her dissertation will be bound in two volumes; she is in no rush to finish—delays and disruptions are welcomed—it gives her more time to learn, read, think, write, and re-write.

She meditates, journals, and is rarely ill.

Good things always find her.