Impatience and entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship research has long argued that some of the traits that encourage individuals to start businesses may also undermine subsequent performance. Using a large nationally representative longitudinal survey from the U.K., we test this proposition by investigating the role of survey-measured impatience in both the decision to leave paid employment for business ownership and subsequent earnings outcomes. While impatient employees search less intensively for entrepreneurial opportunities, once an opportunity is identified, they are more willing to accept it than to wait for better opportunities to emerge. The effect of impatience on entry into business ownership is therefore ambiguous. In contrast, theory predicts an unambiguously negative effect of impatience on entrepreneurial performance. A lower selectivity threshold—which drives the eagerness to accept lower-quality opportunities—combined with lower investment and planning intensity, suggests that impatience depresses realized earnings. Consistent with these predictions, we find that impatience decreases entry into business ownership and, controlling for earnings in paid employment, also decreases realized earnings. Taken together, these results suggest that, in entrepreneurship, “patience is a virtue.”