I used to love going to the library as a kid. I got to skim through the books (and yes, I’m a millennial, but we still did this when I was younger), look at the covers, read the little blurbs, and then pick out a few that I could read before the due date. I would sometimes try to read the first few pages of the book to get a better sense of what the book would be like because I didn’t trust the summary. Even as a kid I had some sense that maybe the two minutes spent evaluating the outside of the book wouldn’t lead me to the books I would enjoy the most.
If you haven’t been living in a bunker like Kimmy Schmidt, you’ve probably read or heard conversations about how technology is changing everyone, especially us younger generations. It’s creating an impatience for anything that doesn’t provide instant gratification, and in some ways, changing how people make decisions. We don’t want to go out to meet someone so we go onto an app which provides us lots of instant dating options. We want to see our friends who live in another city, so instead of saving our money and waiting a few weeks or months to go on a trip, we FaceTime. A new song comes out – no more waiting until morning to go buy the CD, we can just download the song.
These aren’t bad things – I love being able to FaceTime my family since all live hours away – but I do believe our tolerance for delayed gratification may be lessening. I’m totally guilty of it myself in a lot of ways. Most recently, I noticed it in my career. I’ve been going on a lot of hosting auditions (which I’m grateful to have) but have been discouraged by the constant rejection. I know that very few people make it in the industry overnight; yet, I see how easy it would be to do something else, and it makes me want to quit. I don’t remember being like this when I was younger. Whether it was piano, basketball, or swimming, I kept at each even when I wasn’t the best, only stopping when I realized that I wanted to move on to something else.
As cliché as it sounds, I know nothing easy comes from that which is easy. If it’s easy to attain, it’s just as easy to lose (and doesn’t my diet regimen know it… three weeks to lose a pound and 1 second to gain it). I could settle for that which is more available and easier to come by, but is that truly the best use of my gifts? So my friends, if you too want to give up on something because it feels too hard, remember the book covers – no book cover tells the end, and what you see now in the midst of your tribulation is not the end, it’s just part of your story.
Leslie Delery 