Stop Deciding And Start Choosing
A client is at a real crossroads.
Leave the business he’s spent 10–15 years building.
Or not.
I’ve been there.
Clouds of variables.
“If this… then maybe that…”
Round and round.
Head full. No clarity.
Three words sit underneath it all:
Almost infinite variables.
It doesn’t fit our preferred story - capable, in control, master of our domain.
But here’s the rub:
Decision making is largely a delusion.
Don’t take it from me.
Let’s go via Harvard…
then back through a few thousand years of practice…
and land with you.
The Academic View
Dr Ellen Langer runs a simple experiment:
For a week - don’t decide. Just choose.
This or that.
Big or small.
Her point:
Worry less about making the right decision -
and more about making the decision right.
And guess what?
Things work out.
I know the objection.
Choosing a sandwich is easy.
Leaving a company.
A partner.
A life.
Different.
Surely this needs thinking?
Come back to it:
Almost infinite variables.
You are trying to predict an unknowable future
with incomplete information.
So-
Are you making a decision?
Or avoiding a choice?
Often, what we call decision making is delay.
Waiting for clarity.
Waiting for certainty.
Waiting for something to shift.
Then-
we lurch.
Less decision making.
More lunging.
What to do?
Two things.
First
Build your capacity to sit in uncertainty.
That’s the skill.
It’s not the unknown that clogs your head -
it’s trying to control it.
Second
Choose.
Then:
Make the choice right.
Not find the perfect answer.
There isn’t one.
But choose a direction
and work it into truth.
Stay - make it right.
Leave - make it right.
Yes, it feels risky.
Yes, you’ll worry it’s wrong.
But you’re already guessing.
You’re just calling it thinking.
A midlife footnote
James Hollis writes that midlife isn’t a crisis.
It’s a death.
The story that carried you through Act I is ending.
Something else wants to emerge.
Most people hesitate here.
Hover. Delay. Sit on the fence.
But the aliveness?
It sits on the other side of choosing.
You can wait.
Or-
you can choose.
And make the choice right.