On Decisions

There’s a useful distinction between two kinds of decisions: one-way doors and two-way doors. One-way doors are hard to walk back — they commit you to a path. Two-way doors can be reversed cheaply if you don’t like what you find on the other side.

Most decisions are two-way doors. We treat them like one-way doors because the act of choosing feels permanent, even when it isn’t.

The cost of over-deliberating

When you spend three weeks deciding on something reversible, you’ve made a trade: three weeks of optionality for a marginally more informed choice. That’s often a bad trade. The information you’d gain from just doing the thing typically exceeds the information you’d gain from more deliberation.

Speed is underrated. The faster you can move through two-way doors, the more experiments you run, the faster you learn.

What deserves real deliberation

The one-way doors. Who you work with. What you build. Where you live. The things that shape the option space for everything that follows. These warrant the careful thinking we routinely waste on low-stakes reversible choices.

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