Make The Decision

Just make the decision. Don't schedule 14 planning sessions and 37 focus groups. Don't wait for five levels of buy-in. Don't hide behind the parts of the situation that you don't have full information about. Just make the decision.

Sometimes you will be wrong, which is fine. You will rarely be catastrophically wrong if you've been paying attention to the people around you. It's fine if you need to adjust. You only find out how much you need to adjust when your ideas hit the real world. And your idea can only see the real world after you have made a decision.

Stop waiting to make one great decision, when you could have made ten good decisions in that same time. There is a velocity that comes attached to decision making. The more decisions you make, the more opportunities you will get to make decisions. More decisions usually result in adding more value. And as with anything else, the more you practice, the better you get.

That item on your to-do list? Just make the decision. That stack of papers in your office? Just make the decision. Those emails in your inbox? Just make the decision. Seriously with these inboxes. How many of the 1,000 (or more) emails in your inbox did you open and say "I'll make a decision on that later." Every time you open your inbox, you feel like a character in a scary movie hoping that they don't run into the axe murderer. Open email, make decision, repeat.

Decision makers advance in all areas of life. Sometimes they're not even good at making decisions, they've just been identified as "a person of action." If you can actually splice your solid expertise with some decisiveness, you get to rule a chunk of the world!

"In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing." - Theodore Roosevelt (Maybe. You know quote attribution can be pretty sketchy).