A Belief About Decision Making

Something that many people struggle with is decision making. They overwhelm themselves with the different options and the tradeoffs of each and it can become really ineffective when you are stuck and can’t make a final choice.

At a certain point, you’ve gone through all of the information you have and the indecision comes from trying to understand what is uncertain. But fortunately there is a way to find confidence in the unknown so that you can move boldly forward into whatever’s next.

What if you believed that no matter what, you’re going to make it work? That regardless of which road you go down you’ll achieve your goal?

This completely shifts the dynamic in the decision from fear to possibility. You’re not choosing what’s less bad, you’re figuring out what’s more good. This allows you to arrive at a final informed decision sooner, without trying to fill in all of the blanks, because you believe that you’ll be able to craft a positive result.

And honestly, that’s how it needs to work. Just like innovation and iteration need us to get real feedback, it does not serve us to spend too much time evaluating unproven assumptions. The idea here is that if you take a step in the wrong direction, you’ll be able to take two in the right direction before you would have taken your first overthought step.

How do you do that? Think through the evidence you already have. You have survived everything you've experienced so far. You have countless examples of how the ‘worst case scenario’ never came to fruition. Remember that most decisions can be undone and redone, and people don't care as much as you think they do when you make a mistake because guess what - they make mistakes too.

So take the pressure off of yourself. When you trust your ability to figure it out (even when it doesn’t go perfectly at first) you will begin to accelerate progress because you’re facilitating a fast-learning feedback loop.