The Tyranny of Urgency For Senior Leaders
Why treating your career like a leased BMW is costing you your future.
I have a confession to make.
I am incredibly impatient.
When I want something, I work my ass off, I reverse-engineer the path to get it, and I take it. That drive has built my businesses and provided for my family.
Many of the senior leaders I work with share this trait.
It’s also one of the reasons that we can see the pattern in others and why we often obsess about correcting courses to avoid costly mistakes for our clients and employers.
However, impatience has a dark side.
In the last five years, I have bought, traded in, or leased over 10 new cars.
In 2024, I cycled through four different BMWs.
Four. In twelve months.
That’s not intended to be a weirdly arrogant flex—rather—it’s quite embarrassing being the dad taking the top down on a BMW in a Tahoe snow storm so he can get his toddler out of the back seat.
I am—or at least have been—that belligerently obnoxious.
Yes, a car seat does fit in the back of an M8 - I don’t recommend it.
FWIW, now I drive a Silverado and a Suburban.
I prioritize what’s best for taking care of the household and comfort for the entire family over my gearhead neurosis.
But my lack of patience doesn’t stop at the garage. My family has moved 8 times in the last 10 years.
An ugly truth about my psychology?
The second I am not totally happy—the moment a hint of friction, discomfort, or boredom sets in—I make a change.
Probably another reason that I have been coined the guy you talk to for career transition work. I’m a big proponent of embracing change.
Perhaps it’s taking self-agency a bit too far—or simply a fear of avoiding the uncomfortable phases.
I buy a new car. I pack up the house. I change the scenery.
We can poke fun at how absolutely frivolous, wasteful, ridiculous, and privileged that all is—but I’d prefer to think of it as reinvention of self if only to protect my ego.
It is a dopamine hit disguised as a solution. It is childish. And it is unnecessarily risky financially.
Warren Buffet or Dave Ramsey or whoever today’s financial gurus are would slap me silly.
I’m sharing this embarrassing lack of impulse control to hold myself accountable. But more importantly, I’m sharing it because it’s the exact same psychological trap I see destroying the careers of the executives I advise.
When we feel friction in our roles, we want out yesterday. When we get a new job offer, we want to sign it immediately.
We treat our careers the way I treat my garage.
When we’re uncomfortable, we want the discomfort to end as soon as possible. But growth happens when we’re uncomfortable.
My car-buying habit is driven by restless boredom, but I know the urge to rush a career transition is driven by something much heavier: anxiety.
When we feel the friction of a toxic role or the vulnerability of a job hunt, our primitive brain screams for safety. But whether the root is a frivolous dopamine chase in a car lot or deep-seated fear in a boardroom, the result of impatience is exactly the same—we forfeit leverage.
Manufactured Urgency
We live in an era of “need it now” expectations.
Corporate America has trained us to measure our worth by our responsiveness. If you aren’t moving fast, you’re falling behind. Growth at any cost—charts up and to the right.
But in high-stakes career moves, haste doesn’t just equal risk. Haste actively destroys your power—and potentially deeper pain like fulfillment, happiness, and family.
The moment you let the clock dictate your actions, you tend to stop acting like a differentiated solution and often start acting like a commodity.
It’s one reason that it’s easier for many to find or negotiate for a better job while you’re already employed. Your needs are already being met and you have more ability to simply say no.
I learned much of my foundation on timing and urgency from the legendary negotiator Herb Cohen in his book, You Can Negotiate Anything.
Cohen taught us that time is a weapon.
The side that is sweating the deadline is the side that loses.
However, in the senior leadership arena, most urgency is manufactured.
When a recruiter says, “We need an answer by Friday,” or a hiring manager pushes for an accelerated start date, they weaponize time against you.
They know that urgency triggers your primitive brain.
It creates a scarcity mindset.
This pressure encourages you to bypass your strategic thinking and default to your biological need for safety and immediate gratification.
Appeasing this false urgency is the fastest way to leave money, title, and autonomy on the table.
When you rush into the next role just to escape the discomfort of your current transition (or the discomfort of negotiation in general), you aren’t negotiating against the company.
You are negotiating against your own anxiety.
What if instead, you began challenging the urgency?
Why is that deadline there?
What happens if that deadline is missed?
What’s really at stake?
Asking a few simple follow up questions can help you better understand what the organization really values—and may give you new angles to explore how to “expand the pie” and collaborate on a stronger, more valuable (e.g, lucrative), solution for everyone involved.
Leaders Plan in Years; Panic Reacts in Days
When you are desperate to escape a bad role, you start measuring your life in days and weeks.
You just want the pain to stop.
But true leverage requires you to act like the senior leader you are.
You have to separate your immediate anxiety from your long-term strategy.
The strongest negotiators are the ones who have built the psychological runway to sit comfortably in the uncertainty of waiting.
Wealth, power, and leverage are built on the ability to delay gratification.
If you want to elevate your career, you have to expand your time horizon. You must decouple your ego from the dopamine hit of a fast offer or a quick exit.
Or that sexy Porsche 911.
True leverage is the ability to look at a “good” offer, recognize that it doesn’t align with your vision, and say no—or have the audacity to challenge what it would take to transform it from a no way to a no brainer.
It’s at that point that meaningful negotiation really begins. The point of muscle fatigue and uncertainty that stimulates growth for everyone involved.
The Power of the “Right” No
Saying no is a muscle.
Flexing it proves to yourself—and the market—that you are not desperate. Pricing and positioning yourself as a premium solution can have a similar effect.
For example, a high price signals that you’re okay with saying no to a larger audience that would work with you at a lower price.
To reclaim your power during a career transition or exit, you have to actively resist the temptation to act in haste.
You have to stop rushing a deal at the first sign of discomfort—even though being in a career transition, looking for a job, or schmoozing another networking event is akin to chewing glass.
Here are a few ideas the next time you find yourself in the heat of the muck.
Call the Bluff on Deadlines: Artificial deadlines are designed to force concessions. When handed an exploding offer, try silence. They will come back to you prior to your response, often revealing key information that will help you negotiate better. If the offer vanishes because you took 48 hours to consult your family, it wasn’t a strategic fit—it was a trap.
Embrace Strategic Delay: The longer you can stretch the conversation without killing it, the more invested the other side becomes—and the more time you have to develop strong alternative options. As their investment of time and energy grows, your leverage compounds. You also gain the opportunity to establish more scarcity for your time while communicating at a control cadence that better serves your needs.
Your ability to say “no” to an okay opportunity today is the only way to secure the right opportunity tomorrow.
There is a popular rule in business: “If it isn’t a hell yes, it’s a hell no.”
But in high-stakes career transitions, that rule only applies to the final outcome, not the starting line. When handed an okay offer, don’t just walk away—and definitely don’t cave in.
Use strategic delay to stretch the conversation. Challenge the constraints.
See if you can negotiate that “maybe” into a “hell yes” before you make your final call.
Finding Peace in the Garage
I am working hard on my own impulse control—especially because my boys need it to become honorable men—and I wish my parents had done that work with me.
I’m trying to learn how to sit in a house for more than a year without browsing Zillow at 2:00 AM to see if people have finally accepted that the market sucks. I’m trying to drive my truck without wondering what the new M3 drives like.
Fortunately, the new BMWs are so ugly, I don’t have to worry about the performance.
So long M8… and yeah, the license plate was NEGOT8. Cringe.
Because I know that every time I act in haste, I am trading long-term compounding value for a short-term hit of relief.
When you rush your career, you risk everything for the illusion of progress.
Stop appeasing the panic. Slow down. Expand your time horizon.
The moment you prove you don’t need the deal right now, you gain the power to write your own terms for the deal that actually matters.
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Stay fearless, friends.