These are a few things I've learned about myself in the last few years:

The more creative I perceive something to be, the more I enjoy doing it. Some of what I really enjoy doing may not look creative to anyone else, but the key here is my perception of what I'm doing.

I'm not as willing to take crap people hand out as I was when I was younger. I think having to deal with boatloads of it during the years my mother was ill built up my resistance. And her unwillingness to take crap seemed to pass on to me at the moment of her death. I haven't quite decided if this is a good thing.

Along the same lines as the resistance mentioned above, I am less willing to put up with being annoyed. I am still mostly polite about it, but will move fairly quickly to get annoyances out of my face. Sometimes that means I take my toys and go home.

Even with the resistances mentioned above taken into account, many of my friends think I am more patient than they are. I think that's a matter of perception, but I take their saying it as a compliment.

I give credit for whatever extra measure of patience I may have acquired to crocheting, especially to filet crocheting, where a mistake almost always has to be corrected to keep the finished piece from looking bad. (Filet crochet is where a design is created by using solid and open blocks of stitches, and filet patterns often resemble those for cross-stitch.)

I still have no patience with liars.