Great Clips or Weldon Barber, are you feeling lucky?
but ask yourself with regard to every present difficulty: 'What is there in this that is unbearable and beyond endurance?' You would be ashamed to confess it! And then remind yourself that it is not the future or what has passed that afflicts you, but always the present, and the power of this is much diminished if you take it in isolation and call your mind to task if it thinks that it cannot stand up to it when taken on its own.
Jamming on the parking brake, when going 90, down the highway, is a bad idea.
I sometimes miss a turn, or don't plan well enough to be in the correct lane, when I arrive at the intersection.
What I do, is go "D'oh!", continue to the next intersection, then either make a U-turn (if legal), or turn onto a side street, with the intention of recovering my intended direction.
What I often see people in the same situation do, is jam on the accelerator, swerve across six lanes of traffic, and screech into their turn.
That may get them where they are going, but it also has a very real chance of earning them a ticket or a stay in hospital.
My way takes a bit longer, but no ticket, no accident.
Video of Bezos talking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxsdOQa_QkM.
IMO it’s a useful decision making strategy at times, mostly to not overthink the easily reversible.
In the last 15–20 years, many people have been forced into an uncomfortable moment due to job loss (Great Recession, COVID, AI etc). They have learned to recover. Could this be why we see more entrepreneurs than ever before now?
(Also works well with LLMs, for risk assessments)
Second point is: You don't need to reverse the decision you took, instead you may find a way to fix the impact but not the root-cause.
It's like when one fucks up the MySQL replication and the data consistency is corrupted. One can manually (and slowly) fix the inconsistency with downtime. Or, spin up a whole new cluster from an existing well-known node/state. Some entities may be missing, but you could gradually add them back later.
Not a reversible, but recoverable decision.
Amazon goes by with one-way vs two-way door decisions internally. Sometimes adding much bureaucracy to the equation. Just-do-it/Bias-for-action aspect usually don't go as far as the recovery period prolongs.
That mindset has served me well both personally and professionally.
Only difference is time. Much like an eventually consistent transactions, recoverable decisions have propagation latency.
The breaking part here is that will you able to survive until the recovery is complete?
> Conventional leadership advice suggests looking at decisions as reversible or non-reversible. Many important, non-reversible, decisions are recoverable, though.
as a solo dev, i used to agonize over stack choices, architecture patterns, even naming conventions. then i realized that in a small codebase, almost everything is a two way door. you can rewrite a service in a weekend. you can swap a database before you have real users. the actual irrecoverable decisions for early stage stuff are almost always about time and opportunity cost, not technical choices.
the one that gets people is when a recoverable decision feels irrecoverable because of sunk cost. you spent three weeks building something, so changing direction feels like throwing away work. but the work is already spent regardless, the only real question is what's the best move from here.
Except when they get in an accident trying to force it. Or when they were too distracted unnecessarily overtaking someone near their turn.
So imo it’s splitting hairs over the same outcome.
An example - say you introduce 5 day return to office. Half you staff leaves and you now go back to a flexible work from home model. You don’t “undo” the damage done, but you can recover. It was a costly 2-way door.
When you need to make an anxiety-inducing decision, ask yourself: What is the worst realistic outcome? Will you be able to recover from it?
Let’s say you want to make a product and sell it, and you need to invest in inventory. The manufacturer needs you to order $1,000 worth to meet their minimum. The worst outcome: you only sell to a few friends. Can you recover from spending nearly $1,000? If not, how do you put yourself in a position to recover from it? In other words, how can you make this decision more recoverable?
Or, can you make an irrecoverable outcome less likely or drastic (by taking pre-orders, earning extra with a part-time job or freelancing, or selling some old devices or clothes you don’t use—amongst many other ideas)?
Keep in mind: when you’re in a good position, you can win in all sorts of ways.
Here’s a day-to-day example: A haircut is recoverable because it grows back. Yes, a bad haircut can feel mortifying, but it won’t be permanent. It’s still a decision—and for some, anxiety-inducing—but it’s one you will recover from.
Conventional leadership advice suggests looking at decisions as reversible or non-reversible. Many important, non-reversible, decisions are recoverable, though. The more recoverable a decision is, the more useful it is to bias for action.
Entrepreneurship involves the skill of making more decisions recoverable.
Thanks to my partner Bernice Liu for the idea.