A Quick, Wrong Decision Beats Perfect Indecision

How do you make decisions?

Personal, business, relationships. What's the filter you use to keep yourself moving in the right direction?

You know the old adage you hear all the time…

When you're choosing a product or service, you get to pick good, fast, or cheap. But you only get two.

Cheap and fast works if you're okay sacrificing quality. Good and fast is fantastic if you're willing to pay for the expertise. Good and cheap is rare, and if it's truly both, you're going to be waiting in line for it.

Everything is a trade-off in this world. There's no such thing as perfect. And most of us are making decisions without ever bringing clarity to how we actually make them.

Growing up, we all get forced into a mental model for how decisions should be made, whether we know it or not. We didn't set out to build it. It got adopted and adapted through reps and experiences.

Our parents. Our teachers. The friends we chose to spend time with. All of it shaped how we decide.

It happens so quietly in the background that we rarely stop to ask how much of our approach we actually built versus just absorbed.

And as adults, we don't stop to look at it critically. We settle into a "that's just the way I am" mentality.

That's a mistake. A critical miss if you want to maximize your life.

For me, this is something I have to constantly evaluate. Because I'm fighting a default I didn't choose.

I've dealt with perfectionism creeping out of my younger years into my adult life. A good student, a good athlete, and parents who expected a lot. Together, they built an infrastructure in my mind I didn't even know I owned.

A 95 on a paper was good. But I should've made a 100.

Win the game, then lie awake analyzing every throw I missed.

Without knowing it, I developed a sharp eye for my own shortcomings as a young man. And that bled straight into how I made decisions when I started building my first company.

I struggled when the pieces were vague. I craved certainty and a defined system. More data. More time to weigh it. More proof. The list never ended.

That was a brutal way to operate while scaling a business in the metal recycling industry, where things move fast and the information is never clean.

In this industry, I was forced into a crash course of fast decision-making. This is a market-based industry that is highly competitive. Prices move daily sometimes, and you have to be able to call pricing on the fly for material when you’re trying to land a new customer.

When I first started, I would freeze. I would second-guess the metal, the quantity, the margin, the price, all of it. It was so uncomfortable for me, and I lost out on dozens of lucrative deals because of my indecision.

It was a trial by fire, and I was getting burned...badly….until a mentor of mine gave me the business.

Here's the sauce:

“Every decision you make is never inherently good or bad. It just leads to another decision.”

That single line stopped me in my tracks.

I wish I could tell you it flipped a switch and turned me into a fire-breathing entrepreneur making fast calls overnight. It didn't. It took me years to turn that one sentence from something I understood into something I actually practiced.

A few mantras helped me make that jump.

You'll never have all the information. Move when you've got 70% of it.

Think catastrophic when you're stuck. What's the absolute worst that can happen? If you can live with it and you've got a rough idea of how to recover, make the move.

Build the case for the upside. We're wired to instantly list every way a decision could fail. Stay balanced. If you add something to the risk column, you're required to add to the upside column too.

And the one that changed everything for me:

A quick, wrong decision beats a perfect indecision. Every single time.

Sit with that one. Because most decisions are rarely worth the time we pour into them in the first place.

A decision should be measured by one thing. How fast it moves you into action. That's the metric.

So stop measuring your decisions as good or bad. Start seeing them for what they actually are.

Directions.

Just another Y in the road, where you get to choose which way you go and what you make of it. You act on what you know to be true right now, you weigh it against the risk, and you move.

Success comes to the people willing to make quick, bold decisions. Not the ones waiting for everything to line up before they'll budge.

I'm in the arena with you on this one. We're both still fighting the brain's favorite trick: delay, wait, stay safe.

Be intentional. Make bold moves.

You're only one decision away from your next decision.

Act accordingly.