He That Can Have Patience Can Have What He Will

In February 2007, Ta-Nehisi Coates visited the unemployment office in Harlem.

He had just lost his third job in seven years and had come to the office to attend a seminar on, ‘work, responsibility, and the need to stay off the dole.’ He was thirty-one years old.

At that moment, he second-guessed whether he should quit his dream of becoming a writer and get…