Be impatient — Ben Kuhn

Ben Kuhn argues that (a particular form of) impatience is a virtue. The good version is the habit of frequently asking “how could this thing take less calendar time?”

A personal story illustrates the mindset: at the visa desk in Addis Ababa, Kuhn sprinted ahead to hold a place in the passport queue so he and his partner could wait at the departure gate instead of in the longer line. His partner was not impressed. In retrospect he recognizes the pattern — he does mental critical-path analysis on any activity taking more than 15 seconds.

(The bad manifestations, like ditching your partner in an airport, should be avoided. The useful part is the underlying optimization question.)

Why Impatience (as Calendar-Time Optimization) Correlates with Effectiveness

Across many domains, being really fast correlates strongly with being effective.

Email

Powerful, interesting, famous people tend to read their own email and respond surprisingly quickly. They are curious and have very little time; friction means things get deprioritized.

Sriram Krishnan and Sam Altman both note that fast response to important email is a strong positive signal.

Startups and shipping velocity

Decisiveness and bias to action separate the best founders. Mediocre founders talk about grand plans without deciding or shipping.

The best YC companies get new things done between every conversation.

This shows up at the operational level: continuous deployment and high deploy frequency are markers of high performance.

Instagram was famous for “Yolout” (any engineer could deploy at any time). Facebook moved from weekly to daily to continuous deploys.

The Accelerate research found that, compared to low performers, high performers had 46 times more frequent code deployments and 440 times faster lead time from commit to deploy.

Web and app performance

Users abandon slow experiences dramatically:

BBC lost an additional 10% of users for every extra second of load time.
53% of mobile visits abandoned if >3 seconds (DoubleClick).
AutoAnything saw 12-13% sales lift after halving page load time.

Google treats speed as a feature because faster search encourages more searching — it becomes an extension of your mind with zero projected cost between thought and action.

Fast tools change behavior

Nelson Elhage’s observations on Sorbet and Livegrep at Stripe:

When typechecking the whole codebase became fast enough (10-20s), it became developers’ first line of feedback for basic errors.
Livegrep’s speed made people use it interactively, refining queries on the fly until they found what they wanted — behavior rarely seen with slower search tools.

Getting mediocre-but-instant feedback was more valuable than waiting minutes for something better.

Personal workflow and typing

Fast typists and shortcut users are over-represented among the best engineers.

Sam Altman made an explicit effort to type really fast and learn workflow shortcuts.

Steve Yegge (via Jeff Atwood): the most important CS course is Typing 101. The engineers who build great things can type.

At Wave, the best engineers were disproportionately fast at typing and keyboard-driven workflows. Not the root cause of skill, but it amplifies.

Negotiations and hiring

At Wave, moving candidates through the hiring process faster materially increased offer acceptance rates. Slow processes give time for interest to fade and signal lack of excitement.

Caveats and framing

Kuhn is careful: the useful impatience is the internal question about calendar time, not rudeness or skipping understanding. In the post he confesses the airport story as the moment he realized he was “unreasonably impatient,” then spends the rest arguing for the productive version of the trait.

See also its placement in the generalist reading list under Dispositional characteristics: a-reading-list-for-generalists-dylan-bowman.

The core idea is captured in be-impatient.

The core idea connects to other writings on agency and strategic execution in the cluster.