02719: One Step at a Time


One of the essential life skills that tabletop gaming helps foster is that of patience. At its most basic, you learn to wait for your turn to act and try to remain focused as the other players around the table take the time to make their respective moves. There's also the need to think ahead, form a plan and still exercise more patience to see it through turn after turn after turn. It can be a frustrating process at times and it can be stressful as well, especially when you see other players mess up your planned moves, leaving you to try to think of alternatives in the limited time before it's your turn to act again.

Patience is an important life skill. Life can be quite challenging and different people and situations will wear your patience away to nothing if you're not careful. But you steel your nerves, focus on the more important things and wait. Reacting based on instinct or emotion or both more often than not leads to folly. But preparing a thoughtful, calculated, rational response executed at precisely the right time will do a lot more good. And a lot of times, it will feel a heck of a lot more satisfying.

This is why it is often said that patience is a virtue. It takes a certain breed of character to know when to be patient. But I choose to believe that when done right, it almost always pays off.

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