No one ever claimed that i was a "diplomat".  In fact, much the opposite.  Patience and Diplomacy have been things i have never managed well.  And for that reason i always thought it best that i somewhat "hide in the shadows" as much as possible.  I always thought it better if i would "feed" information and thoughts to someone above me--rather than myself presenting them.

Many, many times in my professional life i discovered the fact that i knew more than a lot of the people that i was dealing with.  Look, i was pretty well educated, i had learned some pretty interesting tricks in the nuclear navy, my analytics is some of the best, and i had access to a lot of data and information that no one else had access to.   Put yourself in that situation sometime--knowing that the people that you were working for (both internally within my firm and externally inside our client's mind) did not necessarily appreciate my view of things.

By the time i learned my lesson (if i ever did), there were no bridges left to burn down.  I had acted as professionally as i could, but that was still not enough.  I wasn't professional enough because i did not respect enough--especially to those persons above me.

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Do you want to know something.  I spent four-years in the U.S. Navy where i had the utmost respect for everyone above me.  I probably did my fair share of bitching and moaning, but one thing i never did was disrespect a senior U.S. naval submarine officer.  

But then i get into the business professional environment and that entire world of "respect" was turned upside down.  In the professional world you were supposed to respond to orders even if you did not respect the person giving the orders.  It's not a written rule, but it an "operative" rule.  In the consulting world that i knew, it wasn't important to "know anything", it was more important to "know somebody".  And as long as you had a "somebody" you could get away with "what you don't know or want to tell".

In fact, i always found it paradoxical when my somewhat "questioning" attitude was followed in the professional world with the question as to "how in the world did you survive in the military."   I used to want to puke whenever i heard someone say that to me. 

Patience, Jim. 

I usually held back, but the truth of the relative matter is this.  First of all, even in the military you have the right to question an order.  Second of all, the people above me had earned my respect and that of the entire crew.  

I can say that is something that i never found in the "private sector"--respect that flowed both ways.  The military, sad to say, may be the only place where you can even get an inkling to that.  Even in government it is difficult to have a "continued respectful" attitude when the "political heads of all the institutions" change the organization's vision and perspective every few years.

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I paused and just read over the above because i thought i might have been just "mumbling to myself" and not "addressing the initial point" of this blog.  I am okay with what i wrote, but just the same, Patience is the name of the game right now.

And Patience is probably one of my biggest curses.  And something that I have to learn how to achieve, if i am ever going to be fully enlightened as the world flows on in its own direction.

If you think about it, Talkmarkets offers me the best work that fits my talents and personality, and yet, even there, my impatience rages out occasionally.  At the same time i do have to give myself credit.  After all i am still waiting for Talkmarkets to acknowledge my book called Globanomics, which was published two-years (24-months) ago, in a Talkmarkets' article of note.  $0.00 royalties for the months of July and August.  

Patience is a way to prepare yourself for something that is not going to happen to your liking.  Prudence must also be considered when applying Patience. 

And if i cannot figure things out any better than i just did, then i wonder why i would think i could write a sermon on Patience?

And that is the question i am wrestling with now.