Do You Know Your “Patience Quotient (PQ)”?

By Lee Sang-ki
AsiaN Reporter,
Former President of the Korea Journalists Association

SEOUL: People do not remember for long what has no name. No matter how important an event may be, without a word to describe it, it often remains merely a collection of scattered facts.

I believe the work of a journalist does not end with discovering facts. It also involves finding what those facts have in common, bringing them together into a concept, and creating language that people can remember and use.

IQ was such a term. In 1912, German psychologist William Stern proposed the idea of the “intelligence quotient,” and the two letters IQ eventually became a universal shorthand for describing intellectual ability.

Then came EQ in the 1990s. The idea was that intelligence alone was not enough; the ability to understand and manage one’s own emotions, as well as those of others, also mattered. EQ became widely known through Daniel Goleman’s 1995 book Emotional Intelligence.

These days, I would like to add one more: PQ – Patience Quotient.

Of course, PQ is not a standardized psychological test like IQ, nor am I proposing it as an academic theory. I simply want to give a memorable name to an ability that seems to be growing increasingly scarce in our time.

What, then, does PQ mean?

I would define it as “the ability to endure waiting, uncertainty and discomfort without allowing one’s emotions and judgment to easily collapse.”

When a bus is late, when a phone call or text message goes unanswered, when things do not go as planned, or when others disagree with us, how long can we wait?

When the result we want does not come immediately, can we resist becoming angry and give ourselves another moment to think?

Smartphones have made the world faster. We search and receive answers instantly. We place an order and expect delivery the next day. If a video fails to entertain us within a few seconds, we swipe to the next one.

Speed has become a standard of daily life. At the same time, our capacity to wait has weakened.

Paradoxically, that may be why PQ will become even more important in the future.

PQ does not mean simply enduring everything. Nor does it mean tolerating injustice. Rather, it is the ability to distinguish between the time to wait and the time to act – and not to let impatience ruin our judgment.

Most important things take time.
It takes time to win people’s trust, to build relationships, to study, to create an organization and to change a society. Digging up a seed the day after planting it will not make it sprout any faster.

For a long time, I have been interested in capturing certain phenomena in short, memorable expressions.

In the mid-1990s, I used the word “Camelephant” – a combination of “camel” and “elephant” – in a newspaper article. I used it to describe the paradox of an organization that was slow and cumbersome, yet kept moving diligently.

In 1997, while writing a series titled “The Untold Story of 1,800 Days of the New Korean Military” for the Sunday Newspaper, I used another expression: MQ, or “Morale Quotient,” to describe declining morale in the military during the Kim Young-sam administration.

But a word does not survive simply because someone uses it once. It becomes a real concept only when people discover their own experiences within it and begin using it themselves.

The same will be true of PQ.

I do not know whether the expression will survive. But these days, I find my PQ being tested several times a day.

Whenever I become impatient while waiting for something, I ask myself: “What is my PQ score today?”

Perhaps, alongside IQ and EQ, this is a question we may find ourselves asking more often in the years ahead.