Impatience is a virtue
People say patience is a virtue. That is true, but it hides a second truth. Impatience is a virtue too. Not the kind where you tap your foot in a line. The kind where you refuse to accept avoidable delay. That kind is fuel.
There are two types of impatience. Shallow impatience wants time to pass faster. Deep impatience wants the work to move faster. The first is noise. The second is a thermostat. It turns itself up when the loop between action and feedback grows cold.
Deep impatience asks a simple question. What is the fastest honest way to find out if this is working. If you are painting, the fastest honest way is to put paint on the canvas and look. If you are learning a language, it is to speak it badly today and notice what breaks. If you are practicing a piece of music, it is to loop the four bars you keep missing, not the whole piece. The common move is to shorten the loop, then repeat it until the loop is easy.
This is what makes impatience a virtue. It is not a wish for shortcuts. It is a refusal to wait for news you could get sooner. Most progress is gated by how quickly you can learn what to change. People who are good at things tend to be crafty about cycle time. They pre-chop ingredients before heat goes on. They keep their tools within reach. They write down what failed so they do not test it again by accident. They never wait empty handed.
Bad impatience tries to outrun constraints that are real. Good impatience hunts the constraints that are fake. Dough has to rest. That is real. The oven taking fifteen minutes to preheat because you forgot to turn it on is fake. A tree will not grow faster because you glare at it. A line at a cafe will move faster if one person decides to bus a few tables. Knowing the difference is almost the whole game.
A nice property of good impatience is that it prefers experiments to arguments. If you and a friend disagree about which route across town is faster, you can time both. If you are unsure which paragraph is clearer, read both out loud and listen. The impatient person thinks in trials. Trials make the world less mysterious. And they do not require permission.
Impatience also exposes fear. Waiting feels dignified. It gives you a reason to stand still. If you tell yourself that you are being patient, you can avoid the small embarrassment of trying early and getting feedback you do not like. Good impatience is shy of that trick. It values the feeling of contact over the feeling of poise. It would rather look foolish at 3 p.m. than still be unsure at 8.
There is a superstition about pace. People think speed causes sloppiness. Sometimes it does. Often sloppiness causes sloppiness. Sloppiness breaks feedback. When the feedback is bad, you get nervous, then you rush. The fix is to be strict about quality while being greedy about iterations. Do one clear thing. Look. Adjust. Repeat. Speed the loop, not the step.
You can make impatience practical. Keep a list of frictions you hit twice. Anything that shows up twice is a candidate for a small tool, a checklist, or a habit. If you carry a bag that takes two minutes to find things in, pack it the same way every time. If a room eats your keys, put a hook by the door. If you keep rewriting the same email, save a draft as a template. None of this is glamorous. That is why it works.
Another trick is to measure. Most delay hides in vague time. When you time something, you often learn that the part you complain about is not the slow part. The slow part is the unprepared minute before you start, or the ten minutes after when you are not closing the loop. Once you see the slow part, you can attack it. You can lay out clothes the night before, or put the kettle on first, or write the title before the body, so you know what you are even saying.
Impatience is also good at spotting bad defaults. Official forms that ask for information they do not use. Doors that open the wrong way. Instructions that leave out the one important step. The impatient response is not only to complain. It is to add the missing line, tape a small note near the door, or show the next person how to do the step you learned. These tiny edits multiply. The world gets better in increments no one bothered to ask for.
The hard part is the irreducible. Some things take the time they take. Bodies heal in their own pace. Skill accumulates grain by grain. Friendships deepen across shared years. You cannot push on these without breaking them. Good impatience knows this, and does something clever. It lets the slow part be slow, then it strips delay from everything around it. Bread rests while you clean the counter and prep the next loaf. Paint dries while you stretch the next canvas. A long hike starts before sunrise so the views at noon are your reward, not your queue.
If you want a rule of thumb, use this. Be patient with what you cannot change today. Be impatient with anything you can improve in an hour. This keeps you from magical thinking and from resignation. You stop blaming the universe and start finding doorknobs.
There is a social cost to impatience. People will sometimes call you difficult. They will mean that you ask why. They will mean that you reach for the broom instead of waiting for someone in a vest. They will mean that you change a habit that everyone else treats as a given. They might be right that this is inconvenient. They might also be thanking you a year from now when the new way feels normal.
Patience saves you from despair. It lets you endure slow, worthy things without quitting. Impatience saves you from complacency. It keeps you from accepting slow, unworthy things without a fight. Together they form a good temperament. Without patience, you burn out. Without impatience, you fossilize.
If you are not sure where to start, start with one loop you repeat every day. Breakfast. Exercise. Reading. Make the loop shorter and cleaner. Remove one reach. Lay out one thing the night before. Write one note that spares your future self a puzzle. The difference will feel small, then large. That feeling is not a trick. It is your life decelerating in the right places and accelerating in the others.
People have called impatience a sin for a long time. They were thinking about the shallow kind, the kind that whines at clocks. The deep kind is different. It is the refusal to wait for improvement that is ready to happen. It is the habit of asking for news from reality as soon as reality has it. In that sense impatience is not only a virtue. It is a courtesy. You show up sooner to help.