Not patient, but plenty of perseverance

The power of learning from our mistakes

At the Northern California Renaissance Fair earlier this Fall, I watched a demo by master glass blower Stuart Abelman. He gave me more than just a glimpse into how he creates beautiful art pieces. He gave me a new perspective on startups, and life.

Molten glass dripping from the steel rod he held, Abelman told the crowd

“I have no patience, but I have plenty of perseverance.”

He compared what he does to pottery —when they are working with a piece, potters have to throw it, heat it, glaze it, fire it, and finish it. It takes days before they see the final product of their efforts.

Photo credit: @AblemanArtGlass

Abelman said he doesn’t have the patience to wait that long to see if what he did worked. He wants to see results now. But he’s willing to work it over and over again until it does. He has plenty of perseverance.

I’d always thought of these two as part of the same continuum. A sort of forbearance mindset — patience, and a willingness to keep at it. The epitome of the hard work ethic.

Maybe I’d gotten that wrong.

I went looking for more examples.

Glass blowers, and Art

I’m drawn to blown glass art. I grew up connected to a community of artists, in a home that was filled with art, pottery and glass. My favorite (living) artist is a master glass blower in Georgia, Paul Bendzunas. And it turns out he says very much the same things Abelman does about the art of working with 2000-degree Fahrenheit molten glass. When asked why he chose glass for his medium, Bendzunas said:

“I like the immediacy of glass. I can conceptualize and finish a piece in one process … If you lose a piece, you learn something and go to another.” — Paul Bendzunas

Both these artists are masters at their work. They don’t just produce gorgeous works of art, they’re part of the American art-glass resurgence dating back to the 1970s. They learned as they went — including having to learn how to build the furnaces and tools they needed. They even create their own materials. And they have pushed the medium to explore what’s possible.

What brings us to Persistence?

In my child development courses I taught about the nine traits of temperament identified by Thomas & Chess back in the 1970s. These traits distinguish the basic human responses to the environment. They are present and measurable at birth, and tend to be fairly constant across our lives. They cover activity level, the regularity of our biological rhythms, how adaptable we are, how we respond to new things, what it takes to get a response from us and how intense that reaction is, the general quality of our mood, how easily distracted from a task we are, and our attention span or persistence on a task.

Patience and perseverance seemed to me to fit together into that last one, persistence. And yet — here are two master glass blowers making a clean, neat break between the two.

Not patient, but plenty of perseverance.

And then I saw some other, unexpected, places this new perspective shows up.

Entrepreneurs, and Start ups

I’ve watched my husband and our friends at Silicon Valley at tech startups for 20 years. Last year it was my turn: I joined a startup nonprofit. The speed was intoxicating. Working fast, iterating hard, learning and moving on.

Start ups are all about no-patience. But the ones that make it are also all about perseverance. Not the kind of rigid, locked in, I’m-going-to-make-this-work-if-it-kills-me kind of perseverance. But the kind these glass blowers seem to work with. The kind that works fluidly, embraces “immediacy” and assumes the mentality that “if you lose a piece, you learn something and go to another.”

Elon Musk comes to mind. If you go back and look at his business plans for Tesla from 10 years ago, he’s right on target. That’s hard to even fathom — in that time he has innovated entire new technologies. And yet he was not only able to see it, but he’s kept it on schedule. The only way he could possibly have created the companies he has is to be doggedly persistent. But how do patience or perseverance play into that?

Musk is known for being a very hard person to work for — he has no patience for screw ups or delays. He is also famous for his take on mistakes — they’re expected and you learn from them. Being willing to lose a rocket in order to make progress is a pretty big commitment to the value of failure. Space X lost its first three test rockets to explosions, and others since then. Musk even released a video of favorite explosions back in September 2017. But Musk’s tweets following rocket failures always focus on data analysis. Space X digs in hard to learn what went wrong and build from there.

No patience, but plenty of perseverance.

Start ups that succeed embrace this. And that’s not all. This ‘no patience, all perseverance’ thing shows up in life too.

Children, and Life

I think about children and childhood a lot. I’m kind of on a mission to help people see kids’ minds differently, and I’m writing three books on kids.

Thinking about Abelman’s message, I realized it holds for kids as well.

Children are, by and large, not patient. They want results — or information, or comfort, or whatever—pretty much right now. That’s not to say waiting isn’t good for them (it is, and I have lots more to say about that some other time). But most children don’t come by it naturally or easily. What most children do come into the world with, though, is a huge capacity for persistence. It’s what enables them to crawl, and later to walk in the face of all that falling. It enables children to work through the Herculean effort it takes to learn to speak the sounds of the language or languages they hear around them. It’s also what enables them to explore and learn about their world.

One of the things I’ve written about is the importance of instilling children with the belief that “Mistakes are opportunities to learn.” It’s both simple and radical, at the same time. Simple because who doesn’t, at some level, believe that our mistakes offer us lessons. Radical because to truly live and breathe this changes your entire outlook on action. It enables us to take that innate perseverance and use it.

To truly believe and accept that mistakes are opportunities to learn means watching that rocket blow up on the launch pad and feeling excitement and possibility, not gut-churning regret.

Technology, and the Road Ahead

Seeing our mistakes as the source of our next, better, knowledge is a complete shift of mindset. To believe that we need to incur loss, frustration, and failure not as a burden or to toughen us up, but as a necessary and valued step in the path to succeeding. In whatever area you’re working: That code that just failed to compile is helpful to us. That robot that fell over teaches us and moves us forward.

And the kids who think this are the ones who are going to build the next companies. They’ll be the ones who bring AI online in full, bring nanotechnology to the masses, and hack the biology-technology boundary.

This is where we are headed, I think. The ever-increasing pace, the demands on our attention. We are moving fast and faster, away from any sort of patience. That’s not to say waiting isn’t good for us (it is, and I have lots more to say about that, too, some other time). But it is becoming increasingly clear to me that the distinguishing feature of breakthroughs will be perseverance, coupled with a kind of artistic vision.

Art. Entrepreneurship. Life. Tech. It all makes so much sense now.

These glass blowers, with their ancient technology of fire and furnace, are offering us a clue for the new-tech road to come: not patient, but plenty of perseverance.