Happy Tuesday,
There’s a decision you’ve been circling for weeks. Maybe months. It steals more growth from a practice than any competitor ever will, and it does it quietly, because the cost never shows up on a report. It just sits in the background, wearing you down.
Most of the decisions that drain you are ones you could undo. The exhaustion rarely comes from the decision itself. It comes from treating a choice you could reverse next month as if you’ll be stuck with it for good. Name the door before you study it, and almost every one you’re agonizing over turns out to open both ways.
When a decision is reversible, a slow maybe costs more than a fast let’s try. Being wrong is cheap. Being slow is expensive. The hire you keep delaying, the schedule you won’t test, the conversation you keep rehearsing in the shower, you’re already paying for the wait.
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And you don’t get unstuck by adding. Not another spreadsheet, another opinion, another projection. The thing to remove is the belief doing the damage, that the future can be known before you move. Subtract the demand for certainty, and the next step is usually right in front of you.
Jeff Bezos sorts these at Amazon by asking whether a decision is a one-way door or a two-way door. Most, he says, are two-way doors. You walk through, and if you don’t like the room, you walk back out.
So look at the decision you’ve been circling. Before you treat it like a one-way door, check whether it actually is one. Most of the time, you’ve been bringing one-way-door caution to a choice you could simply walk back through.
I built a one-page filter for this exact moment. It’s called The Reversible Step, and it sorts any decision in about two minutes, so you know whether to move now or wait for a real reason. It’s yours, free.