I'm a big fan of DoorDash. It's quick, it's easy, and it takes zero energy. You pick something to eat, and it shows up. But lately we've been trying to cook more often, and last night we made a Breakfast Casserole.
It's fairly simple. You toss all the ingredients in a pan, throw it in the oven, and let it bake. The issue is that it has to sit in the oven for about ninety minutes at 350 degrees, and then you have to let it sit for about another twenty to cool once it comes out.
I get impatient when I cook. The move I always contemplate is turning the heat up to reduce the cook time. Maybe if I cook it at 400 degrees, I can save thirty minutes. Wrong. If you turn the heat up, you'll burn whatever you're cooking, and the ingredients won't come together appropriately.
So why do we try to rush everything in our careers instead of just letting opportunities unfold as they need to? That's the trap we fall into, treating our careers the same way we treat convenience. We want speed, ease, and a clear payoff, and when things do not move fast enough, we assume we are doing something wrong or that we are falling behind. So we turn up the heat. We chase the title before the work has really shaped us, we push for the promotion before the judgment is there, and we convince ourselves that moving faster is the same thing as moving forward, when in reality it is usually just impatience dressed up as ambition.
The problem is that rushing rarely produces something solid. Just like the casserole, things might look fine on the surface, but underneath, they have not had time to come together the way they need to. Confidence ends up brittle, credibility feels forced, and instead of building momentum, we spend our energy managing stress and fixing mistakes that never needed to happen.
Careers are built from ingredients that do not respond well to pressure. Experience, trust, pattern recognition, and relationships all need repetition and time to settle. You cannot shortcut judgment, and you cannot rush the kind of growth that actually sticks. The people who appear to move quickly from the outside are often the ones who stayed put long enough to let the lessons compound, even when it felt uncomfortable or slow.
The hardest part is learning to sit with that discomfort and resisting the urge to force the outcome. Not everything is meant to be optimized, and not every season is about acceleration. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is leave the heat where it is, trust the process, and give the work the time it needs to become what it is supposed to be.