Wait! Pause before you blink, says professor

USD professor Frank Partnoy
USD professor Frank Partnoy — Peggy Peattie / U-T

Excerpt from “Wait: The Art and Science of Delay”

“Professional tennis and baseball players follow the same two-step approach to good decision-making that we should follow in our longer-term personal and business decisions. First, they figure out roughly how much time they will have available to respond. Second, they delay their response as long as they possibly can within that time period. If you watch Albert Pujols hit a baseball in really slow motion, he looks just like Warren Buffett buying a stock: study the pitcher, watch the ball carefully, and don’t respond to any opportunity until you have taken time to decide if it is a good one. Wait as long as you can so you’ll have a better chance of swinging only at fat pitches.”

“The waiting,” rock star Tom Petty sings, “is the hardest part.” To University of San Diego law professor Frank Partnoy, it’s also the most important part.

In a bouquet to procrastinators everywhere, Partnoy has pulled together hundreds of academic studies and lab experiments from a variety of fields to show that delay in decision-making, even for a second, almost always yields better results.

Better results in our relationships, our financial fortunes, our athletic pursuits, our wars. Better lives.

Blink that, Malcolm Gladwell.

“We’re all operating at a dangerous, breakneck pace,” Partnoy said. “We’re not thinking enough, we’re not being strategic, and it’s causing serious problems in the economy and elsewhere. It’s making people unhappy and unproductive.”

Partnoy knows the ideas in his new book, “Wait: The Art and Science of Delay,” are swimming against a swift cultural tide. The technology that increasingly saturates our lives is obsessed with speed. Smartphones are marketed on their ability to send texts and access the Internet faster than the competition. People brag when they tweet something before someone else. Amazon.com is moving toward same-day delivery.

Gladwell’s 2005 book, “Blink,” made snap decisions and first-impressions fashionable (even though much of his best-seller is about the dangers of such “thin-slicing.”) Step away from the fast lane, people fear, and they’ll miss something or be left behind.

But acting too quickly carries its own risks. When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its health-care ruling last month, both CNN and Fox jumped the gun and announced incorrectly that the law had been overturned. Their analysts apparently hadn’t read the entire decision.

“We’re realizing that speed isn’t always good,” Partnoy said.

His evidence comes from surprising places. In tennis, the best players are able to wait longer, just a fraction of a second, before hitting a service return. The funniest comedians know when to pause before delivering a punch line. Preschool children who decline one marshmallow in exchange for two 15 minutes later grow up, according to long-term studies, to get better SAT scores, are less likely to be addicted to drugs and less likely to be obese, and they get better jobs and have happier marriages.

In one chapter of his book, he showcases research into how fast food makes people unhappy by speeding up their lives in other ways. In another, he explores the advantages of a dating service that won’t let people view photos of potential mates before they meet. He evaluates how timing impacts the effectiveness of apologies by public officials caught in sexual transgressions.


