decide sooner than you want

tl;dr: get out of your way

It seems perfectly prudent and defensible to want to spend time thinking a decision through.

The irony, however, is you just might learn more by thinking less, and making decisions sooner and more often instead.

In one of my jobs, we drew all of our prototypes on paper and showed them to our customers before we built anything.

In the span of a month we could go through dozens of iterations, learning from the feedback provided with each one.

We could’ve spent the entire month perfecting an idea instead and maybe it would be marginally better, but it’d be a tough case to make that this is the more useful approach of the two.

If you have a life or death decision to make, of course think it through all you need.

But for the vast majority of decisions you might make where the stakes are not nearly that high — what to try, who to reach out to, what to explore building — stop thinking it over, make like Nike, and just do it as soon as possible.

The consequences are not nearly as dire as you think.

The upside is probably higher than you realize.