Palace/Workshop

Be impatient

agencyimpatiencespeedcalendar-timeexecution

Be impatient

A productive form of impatience is the habit of frequently asking “how could this thing take less calendar time?”

This mindset correlates with effectiveness across many domains because faster feedback loops, more iterations, and lower friction change both what gets done and how people behave.

Manifestations

  • Email: high-status, curious people respond quickly; friction kills follow-through.
  • Startups: bias to action, rapid launch/iterate, and especially high deploy frequency strongly predict performance (Accelerate research: 46× more frequent deployments, 440× faster lead time for high performers).
  • User-facing performance: seconds of load time directly cost users and revenue (BBC, DoubleClick, AutoAnything data).
  • Tooling: when feedback becomes near-instant, users change strategy — they reach for the fast tool first and use it interactively (Sorbet typechecking, livegrep at Stripe).
  • Personal craft: fast typing and keyboard fluency amplify output and are over-represented among top engineers (Yegge, Altman, Wave observation).
  • Hiring/relationships: speed signals excitement and materially affects outcomes (offer acceptance).

Distinction

Not all impatience is good. The valuable version is internal optimization of calendar time and critical path. Rushing without understanding, or external displays that damage relationships, are the failure mode (the airport anecdote is presented as the confession that revealed the pattern).

Relation to other ideas

This is one of the dispositional traits highlighted for generalists and high-agency work. It complements “learning by writing” (rapid hypothesis-test loops) and the non-automatic strategic heuristics (explicit progress tracking, focus on high-leverage actions).

Sources