“A lord spoke to his servant one day:
Lord: Be sure to plant that cherry tree this afternoon.
Servant: But it will not bloom for 40 years!
Lord: Better make it this morning then.”

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
Chinese Proverb (or so the Internets claim)

“If you want fruit today…too bad, you should have planted an orchard 5 years ago. But if you want to eat fruit in 5 years’ time, then you had better start planting an orchard today.”

So here’s where it gets weird. You want to be patient and impatient at the same time. You want to hold one attitude, to be in one emotional state, and its polar opposite, toward the same subject at the exact same time.

Be patient enough to wait for results but not so patient that you do nothing to produce them.

Be patient enough to wait for effects. Be too impatient to wait to start on causes.

As with the vocab paradox, be nonchalant, careless even, about reaping: let the harvest come when it comes. But be a stickler for sowing. Always be sowing. Like a dandelion, always be putting seeds out there.

Patience is directly proportional to duration: screw how long that tree is gonna take to grow; don’t even worry about it. Conversely, urgency is inversely proportional to duration. If it’s gonna take a while to bear fruit, then for that very reason, do what High Expectations Asian Father would tell you to do: you plant now!

It’s just like how you give power to Russell Crow, I mean, Maximus, because he doesn’t want it. You do the opposite of what your intuition wants to do. You build a new intuition — a new skill, a linguistic intuition — by ignoring your current one. You make planes by not flapping. You work with the fact that the Earth is round even though it looks flat.

But enough fake Asian talk from fake Asian dads. Get real: fire up your iPod and VLC and YouTube — start that Japanese playing again.

Be patient about effects. Be impatient about causes.

Patience is not passive waiting. Patience is not static. Patience isn’t sitting down and shutting up — that’s being cooperative and docile to help driving parents. Patience is dynamic. Patience is active preparation. Patience is doing.

If you’re not too preoccupied and too physically tired by active preparation to be worried, then you’re not being patient. You’re just being a whiny, sulky brat. And that’s fine, too. But don’t call it patience.

The patient language learner is watching some Japanese TV right now. She’s whipping out her iPhone and doing Surusu reps every time she gets five minutes here or there. She loves to whip things out .

Patience is silently busying yourself with doing things that help. Impatience is talking very loudly about how nothing works, while doing things that hurt.