One of the sneaky little lessons I took out of introducing Tony Greer to Bogumil Baranowski on Just Press Record was around this idea of “patience.”

Patience is a virtue. Right? That’s what they used to say. Somebody still says that and my gut is inclined to say they’re right. Good things come to those who wait and all that.

More often than not, I can’t argue with a little patience (yeaahhhhhhh-yeah, IYKYK).

But, in the way Tony can make you think a first principal through under real world pressure, he told this story of a client he consults with on trading strategy, to Bogumil and I, and I bet you can see our faces processing this story as he’s telling, about how the client doesn’t want to sell something for whatever reason and Tony points out, “It’s not like you can’t buy it back - the market’s not going to close, you can’t be afraid of THAT part.”

Now, I’m paraphrasing, but that idea - just, sit with it for a second.

In the presence of optionality, where you can reverse course or do something totally different from your original course of action, you don’t always have to be patient.

It’s ok to be impatient.

(Wait, did I just write that it’s ok to be impatient?!)

YEAH. It’s OK to be impatient. So long as you have optionality on your side, use both sides of this coin.

You can still be a long-term thinker.

You can still be well-perspectived.

You can even be self-critical and reflective and all those other important virtues.

But you can be impatient in a positive way, right alongside each of these paths, too.

And as a sometimes stubborn person, that’s a virtuous thing to be told. Because it fits into a context of a very nuanced understanding of what we’re doing and why. It allows room for surfacing other feelings or emotions that might be hard to crowbar into the behavioral box we’re so often managing for, especially in a professional (or portfolio) environment.

Patience won’t always be the right decision. Impatience won’t always be the right decision either. Both will always be options. Probably with a touch of intuition. Probably with a signal of what your gut is trying to tell your brain.

By adding an optionality question, or even a simple “and then what do we do if we figure out we’re wrong” path to our decision process, we can extend our horizons even further.