Indecision

When you’re faced with two options where you know that one option will be good and the other bad, it’s useful to take the time to analyze and determine which one is which.

However, many times in your life and career, you’ll face options that are far more ambiguous. 

Sometimes, the information you’d like to have doesn’t exist. Other times, you face two options that seem equally bad.

When this occurs, it’s easy to get stuck and face analysis paralysis while you try to find the “perfect” decision that just doesn’t exist.

In many such situations, waiting and doing nothing is far worse than pursuing a “good enough” choice quickly.

Action often provides feedback and clarity. If you take an action and it’s the “wrong” choice, the act of taking that path will reveal new and useful information.

If you’re in a burning building and can’t decide between trying to exit from the front door or the back door, attempting to escape from either door is better than sitting in harm’s way indecisively.

If you take the front door quickly and realize it’s blocked, it’s tempting to think you made the “wrong” choice.

However, by taking action quickly, what you did was obtain valuable information about your situation and what not to do.

If you do this quickly enough, you still have enough time to turn around and attempt to escape out the back door.

Decision making in real life is often imperfect. You don’t have complete information. Options appear ambiguous. Clarity sometimes simply isn’t available.

Despite your best efforts to gather and analyze information (which is worth doing), at some point, it’s worth realizing that thinking or analyzing more will have no actual material impact on potential outcomes.

In those situations, it is far better to simply take any reasonable action than to be frozen with indecision.

You can’t completely eliminate uncertainty from your life, but you can choose how (and how quickly) you respond to it.