An impatient world
I borrow the phrase “How Will You Measure Your Life?” from Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor who posed this question to his students in a 2010 article. Christensen urged corporate executives to think beyond the conventional yardsticks of success and consider what truly makes a life meaningful. He has passed since, leaving behind a distinguished academic and professional legacy—one that many would regard as the pinnacle of a lifelong achievement.
The picture of the tombstones above—though not taken from Christensen’s article—is a sobering reminder that our lives, both in the biological and professional sense, are finite.
No matter how accomplished we are, the endgame is ultimately the same. What remains after we are gone are the inscriptions: a snapshot or a brief summary of how a life might be remembered.
The IRRs (internal rate of return) on these inscriptions reflect what we believe success should look like—or at least the version of success we think we want the world to see. Wealth, titles, and decorated accomplishments indicates a life well-lived. We do this vis-à-vis the person next to us, living or dead.
Humans are imitative by nature and hence, we believe that our successes are meaningful only if we compare them with others. To specifically quote French academic, René Girard:
“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind.”
Just as capital flows to the project with the highest IRR, success amongst white-collared corporate executives is often measured by how much one earns and accumulates.
Those who view the world based on IRRs tend to look at success along two dimensions: results and speed. It’s not enough to win, one has to win quickly. Expansion must be fast. Scale must be immediate. If you are not the first, you are last.
Over the past few decades, for good or bad, technological progress has intensified this mindset. What began as a push for productivity gradually evolved into a culture obsessed with acceleration.
There is a fundamental problem with this: Not everything we build—markets, companies, technologies—can be maximized for speed and efficiency. Some of the most important processes in life require repetition, patience, and a gradual accumulation of experience.
Before email, the world operated on roughly 50% capacity since most people could only be reached via phone on weekdays during working hours to get stuff done. With the introduction of email and the Blackberry, which made communication easier outside the office, we have increased this to maybe 70%. Today, instant messaging apps are pushing these limits even further. Mobile apps have completely re-written the rules and boundaries of work and personal life, making it almost imperative for anyone to respond almost immediately to a Whatsapp or Wechat message.
We now live in a highly impatient world, and it is not slowing down. Even at this moment in the year 2026, people in parts of the world are building robots and training AI agents that can execute tasks much faster and sometimes more effectively than a human. And they can do it round-the-clock, threatening the livelihoods of white-collared workers globally.
This fixation on results and speed have led us to squeeze every last second in the 24 hours we have every day, speeding things up dramatically. Patience becomes a drag and increasingly, people are prioritizing instantaneous response time over craftsmanship.
Yet, many processes in life require a necessary passage of time to yield a good outcome:
Muscular strength is built through a habitual response to mechanical stress by weight lifting or resistance exercises. Similarly, stamina and endurance are built through repeated interval training.
Medicine may provide quick relief to the symptoms of an illness, but good health is built and sustained over the years in the form of consistently watching one’s diet. The human body needs time to adapt, grow and repair.
Good banking relationships are not built based on depositing huge amounts of cash overnight, it is developed through underwriting credit and supporting a company’s growth over a period of time.
Nothing replaces the joy of taking the time to read a book from cover to cover, taking time to pause and reflect along the way, as compared to distilling its essence in fifteen minutes through a speed-reading app.
It is easy to be amused by Studio Ghibli–styled images generated by AI, but we still respect the painstaking effort and craftsmanship of the original creators.
There are many other examples that illustrate how some things simply can’t be rushed.
The phrase “practice makes perfect” means we acquire mastery by iterating. Iteration requires first-hand knowledge such as actually doing the work and walking the ground, however mundane and time-consuming it may be.
Without iteration, we risk creating a knowledge ecosystem that is highly transactional and built on potentially fragile foundations. For example, no amount of deep research using ChatGPT, Claude or OpenClaw can replace a rigorous study of the micro-financing landscape in the Philippines when determining whether or not to proceed with entering the market.
By fast-forwarding the steps to acquiring any knowledge and skill—or outsourcing this to automation and technology—we under-appreciate what it means to “go through the motion”.