Instant gratification can be same-day deliveries, self-checkout lanes, superfast streaming speeds, instant cab hailing at our fingertips, and so many more services, which have created in us an inability to wait. "I want it, and I want it now," has become the default stance of the consumer today. A study by Associate Professor Ramesh Sitaraman and collaborators at Akamai demonstrated that viewers begin to abandon a site if the video does not start up within two seconds. Beyond two seconds, every additional one-second delay resulted in roughly a 5.8% increase in the abandonment rate (https://www.cics.umass.edu/news/latest-news/research-online-videos).
The need for instant gratification has influenced not only how products and services are built but also our ability to think about long-terms goals. The hard part for us to reconcile is that overnight successes took decades in the making. Speed is paramount in an ever-changing business landscape and to navigate this...