The Art Of Productive ImpatienceThe difference between being pushy and being productively impatient for your projects and career
I ordered some batteries on Amazon the other day to replace the batteries in a toy for my children, and they arrived two hours later. Two hours and they were on my porch. As an owner of probably-too-many AMZN shares, this frightened me. The company has to be losing a massive amount of money on these types of orders. The engineer in me was awestruck by the software systems, processes, coordination, and infrastructure necessary to make it happen. But the Amazon customer in me was absolutely delighted by the fast delivery. So were my kids. Now, when I order something online and it takes a week or more to arrive, I get annoyed. Amazon has capitalized on a simple human truth: faster is better, even when it isn't strictly necessary. They have systematically rewired my expectations. This isn't just a business strategy. It's a career strategy. We’re told that patience is a virtue. But in the world of work, unexamined patience is often just a prettier word for inertia. The most effective people aren't patient. They are productively impatient. At Amazon, this is codified in one of our most important leadership principles: Delivers Results. Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle. But delivering results isn’t just about completing things faster. My friend Ethan Evans says that delivery is the currency of trust. This connects directly to another Amazon leadership principle: Earns Trust. When you can deliver on time and at high quality, your trust bank account goes up. This is the currency that buys you autonomy and increased scope, including the right to ask for work that would further your career. He calls this Delivery and Earns Trust cycle The Magic Loop. Many folks, including me, have a sense that being impatient is about being pushy or annoying, but it's not. It's about taking ownership of the outcome. It’s about having a simple system for driving the clarity and accountability needed to deliver. It's about being a person with high agency, someone who acts instead of being acted upon. In this article, I’ll share the simple system the most effective people use to overcome inertia, when to apply it to your career, and when it’s actually smart to be patient. 1. How to Overcome InertiaThe natural state of any complex project is to grind to a halt. Your job is to be the force that overcomes that inertia and gets it over the finish line. The thing that will determine whether you meet your deadline is called the "long-pole"—the part of the project that is on the critical path because of its length. I had a former coworker at Amazon, let's call him Raj*. He was a Technical Program Manager (TPM) who left for Google, became a Director, and then came back to Amazon as a Director. His superpower was a relentless, almost religious application of a simple algorithm to overcome inertia. His direct reports would sometimes come to me and complain. "Raj won't let us end a meeting," they'd say, "without going through every open item, assigning an owner, and putting a date next to it!" You can take a man out of the TPM role, but you can’t take the TPM out of the man. My advice to them was always the same. If you know that's what he's going to do, stop being surprised by it. Come to the meeting prepared with that information and preempt his inevitable questions. You'll impress him and make the meeting go faster for everyone. It's not that hard, folks. Raj wasn't being a jerk. He was creating a predictable system for clarity. This is his algorithm:
Actionable Advice Pick one project you're on and identify the long pole or one critical dependency that is blocking progress, even if the item isn’t in your ownership. Then, use the algorithm: confirm the open item, verify the owner, and politely ask for a delivery date or a DFAD. If an owner can't give you a date, your job is to help them. Ask, "What information do you need to get a date?" or "Who can we talk to together to get clarity?" If you're still stuck, the next step is to make the dependency visible by sending a summary email to the project stakeholders. This isn't about assigning blame or “throwing someone under the bus.” It's about transparently communicating risk to the project. What I learned from Raj was that you implement the algorithm with a smile. Your goal is to keep the project moving. Pushing becomes pushy when you make it about your own anxiety. Productive impatience is about a shared goal. You're not asking "When will you be done with my thing?" You're asking, "What's the date for our thing, so we can all plan effectively?" Raj’s team was frustrated because they had to do the work of figuring out the dates during the meeting. The real lesson is that this system works best when everyone comes prepared, turning the meeting from an interrogation into a quick alignment. 2. How to Drive Your Career GrowthYour career has the same default state as a project: inertia. If you wait for your manager to talk to you about your growth, or for the perfect project to fall into your lap next year, you’re not being patient, you’re postponing yourself. If you desire career growth it is your responsibility to apply the same productive impatience to your own career. This can feel icky sometimes because you’ve been told that being selfish is a bad thing. But it is your duty to push your career forward, and career growth is part of the intangible compensation your company gives you.
Actionable Advice If you are a high-performer, but haven’t spoken to your manager about career growth, then during your next 1-1 with your manager, tell them “I’d like to talk about my career growth but I don’t want to blindside you. For our next 1-1 I’d like to talk about my strengths, my gaps, and what it would take to take the next step.” Your goal for the meeting is to come out with a shared understanding of the owner (you, with their support), what needs to be done, what the opportunities are, and a rough date (e.g., "Let's look for an opportunity in the next quarter"). 3. When to Hit the Brakes And Be PatientProductive impatience is a tool, not a universal law. Applying it in the wrong context will backfire. A truly effective person knows when to push and when to be patient. You should be impatient with projects and your career, but patient in other areas. As I wrote a few weeks ago, it's critical to distinguish between inputs and outputs. You should be impatient with inputs—the things you can control—and patient with outputs—the results you cannot. This is the core of strategic patience. For example, you should be productively impatient about:
Actionable Advice Recategorize your patience. Draw two columns: "Impatient with Outputs" and "Patient with Inputs." List the things in your life that fall into these categories. Your goal is to flip them.
ConclusionYou are responsible for the momentum of your projects and your career. Productive impatience is about taking ownership and building the currency of trust through delivery. Just like Amazon rewired my expectations for package delivery, you can rewire your colleagues' and leaders' expectations of you. You can become the person they trust to drive things forward, to bring clarity to chaos, and to deliver results. It all starts with a simple algorithm and the courage to politely ask, "What's the date?" New Podcast Episode: Sundas KhalidSpeaking of taking ownership of your career, my latest podcast guest is a fantastic example of this. I sat down with Sundas Khalid, who went from a high school dropout to a Principal Analytics Lead at Google. Her story is a masterclass in agency and resilience. She taught herself English watching Friends reruns, took two-hour bus rides with her toddler to attend community college, and eventually became one of the most influential data science educators on social media with a following of over 800k people across platforms. In our conversation, we go deep on the brutal realities of being a woman in tech, the hidden costs of success, and why she believes the college advice flooding social media is dangerously disconnected from today's job market. You can watch the ad-supported version of our conversation on my YouTube channel.  Paid subscribers to A Life Engineered get the extended, ad-free conversation. A paid subscription also unlocks the full archive, including popular articles like "5 Simple Ways to Impress Your Boss" and "The 7 Behaviors That Separate Juniors From Seniors." Enjoyed this week's newsletter? Give it a ❤️ so I know to write similar ones in the future. A Life Engineered will always be a free publication, but if you’d like to support it, we’d be honored if you upgraded your subscription. Paid subscribers get the full experience, including access to the archives.
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