Stick with bad decisions

There’s a bit of advice that I’ve told myself over the years that has helped me out in some stressful situations.

Make bad decisions, and stick with them

~ Tyler

“But that is terrible advice!”, I can already hear you saying. I’ve heard that every time I’ve mentioned it to others. Yet when I’ve given it to those who need it, they always understand.

Isn’t that just being obstinate?

No. (And yes, that is what an obstinate person would say, bear with me.) This advice, like all advice, is heavily context driven. Should you jump off a bridge? Probably not. But if it’s on fire, then maybe you should.

To understand the context though, first I want to talk about decisions. Decisions are inherently “decisive”. That means they cut off other options. For example, when I decided to get married to my wife, it precluded me getting married to the billions of other women in the world. (Editors Note: This is NOT an example of a bad decision. Love you sweetie!) My decision cut me off from other options. In this world, a world defined by reality, limits, and shapes, we actually cannot “have it all”.

Now what does this have to do with making bad decisions. If making a decision is decisive, doesn’t it make it that much more important to get it right? Yes. It’s important to make the best choice you think you can. But once again, reality comes and jumps us. We are limited in time, knowledge, and ability. We are guaranteed to make mistakes. Denying that is tantamount to denying that the sky is blue.

Donald Knuth, the famous programmer¹ and computer scientist is famous for having said:

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

He was talking about the mistakes of trying to make code performant before even seeing where it was failing. It’s the same in decision making, however I think this formula is better²:

Belated optimization is the root of all evil.

Once a decision has been made, the time for ‘better ideas’ is over. However, throughout my experience as a leader and decision maker, it is precisely that time when all the “better ideas” start coming out. All of the sudden people who were silent when being asked for input are now experts on how to do it “better”. Such advice is the worst kind: Given late enough to be smugly correct, but too late to be useful.

And herein is the context of my advice. I give it to those who have dared to take the leap, “even if it is rash leap”³. It is to assure them that it is ok to make sub-optimal choices, and to not look back. You cannot go back to where you were. You have cut that off, and cannot get it back. So don’t fret about how Joe Good-Idea thinks you could do it better now.

Admitting Mistakes

Notice that my advice isn’t: “Make Bad Decisions and never regret them”. The point is not to deny that you ever did something wrong. I once worked with someone who could never recognize a failure. Everything was a success. He was allergic to mistakes, to the point he would never admit one. This is not an admirable quality in a leader or a person. This inability led to us as a team continuing to make the same mistakes, and to never progress.

However, when you are willing to both make mistakes and recognize them, something powerful happens. You can begin to grow. Indeed, fear of failure and indecision are just pre-emptively refusing to admit you made a mistake.

Life is a Cycle

The key is to understand that we live life in cycles. We start and end our days the same way. Weeks begin where they end. Seasons rotate on a yearly pattern. Every decision now we make now cuts us off from our past, but also takes us into future iterations. The death of every day is just the birth of a new one, One where we can go forward and not make the same mistakes. So stop being worried about being perfect. You never will be until you make some mistakes.

• Decisions
• Leadership