Is Patience Truly a Virtue in Tech?
Patience is a virtue, but to what degree is it truly beneficial in tech? There’s a finely tuned tension between the drive to get things done (of which entrepreneurs often have an amplified dose) and the patience required to not make an absolute mess of things.
Last week, in a rather violently titled column called Kill the Savior Geniuses, I wrote about unsolvable problems almost always being due to missing information. Find the missing data, and the unsolvable is suddenly not only solvable, but even trivial. The challenge is, many of us lack a tolerance for the time required in acquiring more data.
In practice, this also stems from a general intolerance of that period of uneasy contemplation when we’ve identified that there is a problem to be solved, but haven’t yet solved it. What’s interesting is that the degree to which a person feels this urgency will often control how successful they are at solving a problem.
What I see often is almost no patience for getting things underway and out the door, and an outsized patience for band-aiding it on the back end when it turns out there wasn’t enough thought put into things up front. This could be considered an aggressively risk-tolerant mindset. It gets the flow of energy moving in a project, but isn’t necessarily good for long-term success. There’s a tendency to launch things that are half-baked and don’t really meet the need. Everything ends up costing more than it should and taking longer than it needs to because the same problem keeps being re-solved, with slightly better results each time. Iteration is normal and useful, but you don’t want it to be constant churn because of a lack of thought up front.
Picture a leader with a big problem to solve. They have the idea in a flash of inspiration! It’s a lightning bolt of motivation, instantaneous gratification after perhaps a long period of struggling with the idea. “Aha!” she exclaims. “I’ve got it! An app to connect widget lovers around the world into a widget community!” And thus the idea is conceived. The idea coos, it wiggles. It enraptures the entrepreneur with its specialness and potential.
This feels good. It’s exciting and energizing. The entrepreneur can’t wait to launch and face the adoring crowds who will flock to this wonderful idea.
But as we know, that’s not all. Between that exciting idea, and the exciting launch and success is a lot of sometimes tedious work. Wouldn’t it be great to short-circuit that tedious work and get right to the part that feels good again?
I could say that that’s what advisors like my firm do, but that’s only partially true. We handle a lot of strategy, creative, technical details and, in some cases, tedium, but there’s still plenty of real investment of time and energy from the stakeholders. And one of the most important things the entrepreneur can get right is that tension between patience and urgency.
Too much urgency, and you’ll rush into an answer that’s a poor fit because you can’t bear to make space for a better fit to come to the surface. Too much patience, and the project languishes from lack of momentum.
I’ve witnessed the over-patient imbalance: infinite patience for dawdling over details, to the detriment of the ability to actually launch. This is so rare that I’m not going to spend much time on it but when I have been in the presence of this kind of tension, I think it was due to a fear of the consequences of putting something out there - financial, reputational, and emotional.
What we need is appropriate urgency - enough to keep things moving without jeopardizing the ability to take a thoughtful moment to evaluate the options and gather more information when needed.
A few tactics to test for and keep the right level of urgency:
Set a regular cadence for meetings (a week seems to be the magic amount of time that allows percolation of ideas in between without letting the metaphorical coffee burn to the bottom of the pot). At the same time, in these projects there is recognition that a solid solution that works is more important than performative speed to launch something .
Decide in advance which pieces drive success or failure (we often think of the hook or peak of the experience) These deserve the time to get things right - the rest you may be able to make do with good enough.
Question yourself when you find yourself pushing to get it out one week faster. What’s the real benefit? Our best and most impactful tweaks are often made in that last week of polishing time. What are you potentially losing? Will it be worth it 6 months from now, or are you allowing your judgment to be clouded by false urgency?
After 25 years, I can tell you that sometimes it’s a marathon and sometimes it’s a sprint, but the most successful approach seems to be to aim for that sort of 800m, middle-distance mentality: most of the urgency of a sprint but the attention to pacing and strategy of a distance race. And of course, as my high school track coach Mr. Jorgenson would say, remember to run hard and turn left.
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