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Why are patience and perseverance so important? How do you cultivate patience?
Patience is an underestimated virtue in the modern world. People want results fast, but life just doesn’t work this way—albeit with a few exceptions. Reading these books about patience can help you understand its value and make it part of your own character.
In this article, we’ve compiled a list of the top books about patience and perseverance.
The Power of Patience
To thrive in any aspect of your life, you must develop two virtues: patience and perseverance. Without these qualities, you’ll never achieve ambitious goals and reach your full potential. However, modern society is so enamored with fast results that they buy into the idea of overnight success, which is nothing but an illusion.
The following books about patience highlight why big things are worth waiting for.
Many successful leaders and businesspeople are lauded as “great geniuses,” but psychologist Angela Duckworth argues that talent and intelligence matter less to success than grit: the personality trait behind perseverance, hard work, and goal-setting. In Grit, she explores what grit is, where it comes from, how it drives success, and how you can develop it.
Duckworth is primarily interested in how to raise gritty kids, and her insights have inspired parents and educators around the globe since the book’s publication in 2016. However, she believes that adults, too, can develop grit, and she lays out specific, measurable ways to do so
The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy offers simple tips on achieving success and living the life of your dreams. The idea is similar to compound interest in finance – small, everyday decisions add up to huge returns over time.
While the concept is simple, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Hardy presents six strategies for successfully and carefully directing your choices to shape your destiny in a positive direction and offers a plan of action for improving your results.
Like most people, you’re probably easily distracted by wandering thoughts or social media updates while trying to be productive. In Deep Work, Cal Newport teaches you how to develop patience to focus and resist distractions so that you can rise to the top of your field and drive toward your most important goals. He contends that focus is like a mental muscle: Through deliberate training, you can strengthen your focus and expand your mental capacity.
Newport explains why the ability to do deep work (work that requires intense concentration) is so important in our modern economy, and he shows how to make deep work a part of your life. In addition to exploring Newport’s ideas on how to eliminate distractions, this guide adds advice from other authors on how to work despite present distractions. We also include practical ways that everyday knowledge workers, not just academics like Newport, can prioritize deep work.
Stillness is not just the absence of motion—it’s a perceptible state of mind that’s been sought and recognized as valuable throughout all of history and across many belief systems. Ryan Holiday says stillness already exists in all of us, and with some intentional practice, we can reap its rewards.
In Stillness Is the Key, Holiday takes us through the dimensions of the mind, soul, and body, explaining how to cultivate stillness in each area to enrich our lives, guide us to make better decisions, and encourage a sense of connectedness to everything around us.
Do you struggle with bad habits? Do you try to create good habits that will bring positive changes to your life, but have trouble making them stick? In Atomic Habits, James Clear argues that adopting the right habits will drastically improve your life—but to do so, you must understand how habits work and how you can change yours.
Clear explains that implementing “atomic habits,” or small improvements in behavior, changes your life because behaviors compound—that is, they build on each other to create more and more changes. Performing one good behavior leads to another, then another—and soon, you’ve transformed your life.
During his 20-year career with the Los Angeles Lakers, Kobe Bryant’s unrelenting drive and commitment made him one of the best basketball players in NBA history. From a young age, Kobe wanted to be a great basketball player, and, in order to achieve that, he was willing to work harder than everyone else and make sacrifices that others were unwilling to make. That, in essence, was the Mamba Mentality.
This book pairs Kobe’s reflections and commentaries with iconic photos from the Los Angeles Lakers’ official photographer Andrew D. Bernstein to offer a view inside Kobe’s mind and career. In this summary, you’ll learn how reading the referee’s handbook helped Kobe’s game, why Kobe took up tap dancing during one off-season, and how Kobe dominated the best players in the league.
Final Words
With today’s frantic, fast-paced way of life, we expect everything to happen instantaneously and get frustrated when it doesn’t. As a result, we feel like we are underachieving and speed up even more, but this only sets us back because it leads to burnout. If that sounds like you, reading books about patience and perseverance might teach you some valuable lessons.
If any of these books piqued your interest, you are in luck because you are just a few clicks away from diving into their wisdom. Check out the summaries of the best books about patience and perseverance in the Shortform library.
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