14 Quotes on Grit and Patience For Anyone Pursuing Their Life’s Task

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Excerpt: The following 14 quotes on grit and patience are for anyone who is pursuing their Life’s Task and has every intention on living their best life possible.

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Introduction: There’s no question about it, hard times will come.

Your Life Task is your career/ your creative work/ your mission/ etc., that puts to use your strengths and aptitudes and brings to life your unique visions and goals for the world. Along the way, there are going to be times when you feel incredibly rewarded and times when the journey is going to absolutely suck. The ebb and flow of any long-term pursuit is inevitable and unpredictable and it’s important that we brace ourselves for the days that we know are coming.

There will be victories along the way that will be worth celebrating and there will be failures, setbacks, struggles, challenges, and hard times that are going to require grit, focus, and a game plan. Being mindful is the key practice that will guide us along the way.

With mindfulness, we can identify moments of frustration as opportunities for growth; moments of criticism as opportunities for skin-thickening; moments of laziness as excuses—and in each of these situations, find creative ways to get back to our work. If we’re not mindful, however, we may succumb to our moods and emotional swings and steer away from our journey towards mastery.

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#12 – The way of suffering and doubt is the way.

“Without suffering and doubts, the mind will come to rest on clichés and stay there, until the spirit dies as well.  You must continually start over and challenge yourself.”

Robert Greene, Mastery

#11 – Setbacks, failure, and hardship are seeds for further cultivation.

“You must see every setback, failure, or hardship as a trial along the way, as seeds that are being planted for further cultivation, if you know how to grow them.  No moment is wasted if you pay attention and learn the lessons contained in every experience.  By constantly applying yourself to the subject that suits your inclinations and attacking it from many different angles, you are simply enriching the ground for these seeds to take root.  You may not see this process in the present, but it is happening.  Never losing your connection to your Life’s Task, you will unconsciously hit upon the right choices in your life.  Over time, mastery will come to you.”

Robert Greene, Mastery

#10 – The steep price of becoming too comfortable:

“The human mind is naturally creative, constantly looking to make associations and connections between things and ideas.  It wants to explore, to discover new aspects of the world, and to invent.  To express this creative force is our greatest desire, and the stifling of it is the source of our misery.  What kills the creative force is not age or a lack of talent, but our own spirit, our own attitude.  We become too comfortable with the knowledge we have gained in our apprenticeships.  We grow afraid of entertaining new ideas and the effort that this requires.  To think more flexibly entails a risk—we could fail and be ridiculed.  We prefer to live with familiar ideas and habits of thinking, but we pay a steep price for this: our minds go dead from the lack of challenge and novelty; we reach a limit in our field and lose control over our fate because we become replaceable.”

Robert Greene, Mastery

#9 –  Remember that there are two kinds of failure:

“There are two kinds of failure.  The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid, or because you are waiting for the perfect time.  This kind of failure you can never learn from, and such timidity will destroy you.  The second kind comes from a bold venturesome spirit.  If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn.  Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done.  In fact, it is a curse to have everything go right on your first attempt.  You will fail to question the element of luck, making you think that you have the golden touch.  When you do inevitably fail, it will confuse and demoralize you past the point of learning. You have everything to gain.”

Robert Greene, Mastery

#8 – Practice and learn new skills.  Or else…

“People who do not practice and learn new skills never gain a proper sense of proportion or self-criticism.  They think they can achieve anything without effort and have little contact with reality.  Trying something over and over again grounds you in reality, making you deeply aware of your inadequacies and of what you can accomplish with more work and effort.”

Robert Greene, Mastery

#7 – Embrace the challenges as opportunities for transformation.

“In essence, when you practice and develop any skill you transform yourself in the process.  You reveal to yourself new capabilities that were previously latent, that are exposed as you progress.  You develop emotionally.  Your sense of pleasure becomes redefined.  What offers immediate pleasure comes to seem like a distraction, an empty entertainment to help pass the time.  Real pleasure comes from overcoming challenges, feeling confidence in your abilities, gaining fluency in skills, and experiencing the power this brings.  You develop patience.  Boredom no longer signals the need for distraction, but rather the need for new challenges to conquer.”

Robert Greene, Mastery

#6 – Mastery is a never-ending pursuit.

“In moving toward mastery, you are bringing your mind closer to reality and to life itself.  Anything that is alive is in a continual state of change and movement.  The moment that you rest, thinking that you have attained the level you desire, a part of your mind enters a phase of decay.  You lose your hard-earned creativity and others begin to sense it.  This is a power and intelligence that must be continually renewed or it will die.”

Robert Greene, Mastery

#5 – Remember who you are committed to.

“In dealing with your career and its inevitable changes, you must think in the following way: You are not tied to a particular position; your loyalty is not to a career or a company.  You are committed to your Life’s Task, to giving it full expression.  It is up to you to find it and guide it correctly.  It is not up to others to protect or help you.  You are on your own.”

Robert Greene, Mastery

#4 – Impatience is the ultimate impediment to success.

“Understand: the greatest impediment to creativity is your impatience, the almost inevitable desire to hurry up the process, express something, and make a splash.  What happens in such a case is that you do not master the basics; you have no real vocabulary at your disposal.  What you mistake for being creative and distinctive is more likely an imitation of other people’s style, or personal rantings that do no really express anything.  Audiences, however, are hard to fool.  They feel the lack of rigor, the imitative quality, the urge to get attention, and they turn their backs, or give the mildest praise that quickly passes.”

Robert Greene, Mastery

#3 – Do not fall for the romantic myths and clichés about Mastery.

“Understand: to create a meaningful work of art or to make a discovery or invention requires great discipline, self-control, and emotional stability.  It requires mastering the forms of your field.  Drugs and madness only destroy such powers.  Do not fall for the romantic myths and clichés that abound in culture about creativity—offering us the excuse or panacea that such powers can come cheaply.  When you look at the exceptionally creative work of Masters, you must not ignore the years of practice, the endless routines, the hours of doubt, and the tenacious overcoming of obstacles these people endured.  Creative energy is the fruit of such efforts and nothing else.”

Robert Greene, Mastery

#2 – Keep your focus 5 and 10 years down the road.

“The road to mastery requires patience.  You will have to keep your focus on five or ten years down the road, when you will reap the rewards of your efforts.  The process of getting there, however, is full of challenges and pleasures.  Make your return to the path a resolution you set for yourself, and then tell others about it.  It becomes a matter of shame and embarrassment to deviate from this path.  In the end, the money and success that truly last come not to those who focus on such things as goals, but rather to those who focus on mastery and fulfilling their Life’s Task.”

Robert Greene, Mastery

#1 – You are the only thing holding yourself back.

“The only real impediment to [mastering a skill] is yourself and your emotions—boredom, panic, frustration, insecurity.  You cannot suppress such emotions—they are normal to the process and are experienced by everyone, including Masters.  What you can do is have faith in the process.  The boredom will go away once you enter the cycle.  The panic disappears after repeated exposure.  The frustration is a sign of progress—a signal that your mind is processing complexity and requires more practice.  The insecurities will transform into their opposites when you gain mastery.  Trusting this will all happen, you will allow the natural learning process to move forward, and everything else will fall into place.”

Robert Greene, Mastery

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If you enjoyed the above quotes on grit and patience, you can find more quotes, resources, and info from Robert Greene’s Book below:

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