The person who can wait comfortably may have advantages that waiting alone does not reveal.

Patience often looks like character when it is really circumstance. Someone who can hold out for a better offer usually has savings behind them, or a fallback, or nobody depending on this month’s income. The calm is genuine, and it rests on a floor that is invisible from where you are standing.

Before you envy someone’s composure or scold your own hurry, ask what would happen to each of you if the answer took three more months. Where you have a floor, use it. Where you do not, treat the urgency as information.