No decision is a decision
Your night is free. You throw on your softies and fire up Netflix. You spend the subsequent hour combing through content, stressing over what to watch. In the time you spent fretting over your choice, you could have watched a show, any show, even a bad one, and had a better experience. Sound familiar?
No decision is a decision, and a poor one at that. In my experience, indecision leads to worse outcomes than the wrong decision.
A few more scenarios:
- You ask your partner where they want to go out for dinner. You both are so indecisive that you end up eating the crumbs from an empty bag of chips topped off with a spoon full of peanut butter. You stay in for the night.
- You have two candidates and can’t decide which to hire. You drag your feet, and both get competing offers. You hire neither.
- Your team spends months debating about how to build a feature. You finally build it. Customers could care less.
Making the wrong decision may not lead to the outcome you hoped for, but it gives you footing to iterate and learn.
Don’t stop thinking things through. But when your wheels are spinning and you are stuck in indecision, you are still making a decision.
Put down the peanut butter, make the offer, and build and test that feature, for goodness sake.