Kill the Maybe

There’s a decision you’ve been sitting on. You know the one.

It’s been rattling around your head for a week, maybe a month. You’ve thought about it in the shower. You’ve almost brought it up twice and backed off. You’ve told yourself you’re “gathering information” and “letting it breathe,” which are the sophisticated words a man uses when what he really means is I’m scared to pull the trigger.

And here’s the thing nobody tells you. While you’ve been sitting on it, that decision has been quietly costing you every single day. Not deciding is a decision. It’s the decision to keep paying the tax of not knowing, to keep the door half-open, to let a live question drain a little energy out of every hour whether you notice it or not. You’re paying for it right now, reading this.

Indecision doesn’t feel expensive. That’s exactly what makes it so dangerous.

We treat decisiveness like a personality type. Some guys have it, some don’t, and if you’re a careful, thoughtful man, well, deliberating is just who you are.

Nonsense. Decisiveness is a skill, and hesitation is a habit, and both of them are trained.

Here’s what the hesitation is actually costing you, itemized. It costs you speed, because every day you don’t decide is a day the thing doesn’t move. It costs you energy, because an open loop runs in the background of your mind like an app you forgot to close, draining the battery. It costs you respect, because the people around you can smell a man who won’t commit, and they quietly stop bringing him their best. And it costs you the compounding, because the sooner you decide and move, the sooner you find out if you were right, and the sooner you can course-correct if you weren’t.

That last one is the killer. Speed isn’t the enemy of good decisions. Speed is how you find out. The man who decides fast and adjusts fast runs circles around the man who’s still “thinking it through” six weeks later, because he’s already three iterations into learning what actually works while the careful man is stuck on his first guess.

Here’s the reframe that will free you up more than anything else in this letter.

Almost every decision you agonize over is reversible. You’re just treating it like it’s permanent.

Think of every decision as a door. Some doors are one-way. You walk through, they lock behind you, and there’s no coming back. Selling the company. Firing a partner. The truly irreversible stuff. Those doors deserve time, deserve caution, deserve you gathering real information before you step through.

But most doors, the vast majority of what you sweat over, are two-way. You walk through, and if you don’t like what’s on the other side, you walk right back and try the other door. The new vendor. The tweaked pricing. The hire you’re unsure about. The strategy shift. If it’s wrong, you’ll know soon, and you’ll change it. The cost of getting it wrong is small and recoverable. The cost of standing in the hallway staring at both doors for a month is enormous and invisible.

You’ve been treating two-way doors like one-way doors. That’s the whole disease. And the cure is learning to tell them apart in about four seconds.

Here’s the four-move system I use to kill the maybe and get on with it. Run it every time you catch yourself stalling.

1. Sort the door.

First question, always: is this reversible? One-way or two-way?

If it’s a two-way door, you are not allowed to agonize. The whole point of a reversible decision is that speed costs you almost nothing and hesitation costs you a lot. Decide in minutes, not weeks. If it’s a genuine one-way door, fine, slow down and do the work. But be honest, because ninety percent of the time you’ll find you were treating a two-way door like it was welded shut.

2. Set the clock before you deliberate.

The reason decisions expand to fill a month is that you never gave them a deadline. So give them one first, before you start thinking. This decision gets decided by Friday at noon. That’s the shot clock.

A deadline does something almost magical to your brain. It forces you to stop collecting information you were never going to use and start weighing the information you already have. Parkinson’s law is real. A decision will take exactly as long as you allow it, so allow it less.

3. Decide at seventy percent.

Colin Powell had a rule. Make the call when you have somewhere between forty and seventy percent of the information. Less than forty, you’re guessing. But if you wait for a hundred percent, you’ll wait forever, and by the time certainty arrives the opportunity is gone and someone bolder already took it.

Seventy percent is enough. It’s more than enough. The last thirty percent of certainty costs ten times what it’s worth, and half the time you only get it by making the decision and watching what happens. Stop trying to think your way to a guarantee. Guarantees aren’t for sale.

4. Close the loop and commit.

Once you decide, you’re done deliberating. Done. No relitigating it in the shower tomorrow, no reopening it every time you get nervous. You made the call with the best information you had, and now your only job is to execute it hard enough to give it a fair shot. A mediocre decision committed to fully beats a brilliant decision you keep second-guessing into the ground.

This is where a lot of decisions quietly die, by the way. In the gap between “we decided” and “it got done,” especially the ones made in a room full of people. Everyone nods, everyone leaves, and a week later nobody’s sure what was actually agreed to. I close that gap by recording my important calls and meetings with Fathom, which sits in the background, transcribes everything, and spits out a clean summary with the decisions and next steps already pulled out. No more “wait, what did we land on?” three days later. The decision is captured the moment it’s made, so it actually moves instead of evaporating. A decision nobody wrote down was barely a decision at all.

There’s a lopsidedness to regret that almost nobody factors into their decisions, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Ask any older man what he regrets, and you’ll almost never hear about the bold moves that didn’t work out. He doesn’t lie awake over the business that failed, the risk he took that flopped, the swing he missed. Those he made peace with a long time ago, because at least he swung. What haunts him is the other list. The move he didn’t make. The thing he wanted to say and swallowed. The door he stood in front of for so long that by the time he worked up the nerve, it had already closed.

We regret inaction far more than action, and far longer. A wrong decision stings sharp and then fades, because you learn from it, you fix it, you move on with a scar and a lesson. But a decision you never made just sits there, unresolved forever, quietly asking what if for the rest of your life. There’s no learning in it, no closing of the loop, just an open question that never gets answered because you never let it.

So when you’re weighing a call and the fear of being wrong starts talking, remember to weigh the other side too, the side the fear conveniently never mentions. The regret of the wrong move is loud and brief. The regret of the move not made is quiet and permanent. Factor that in, and suddenly most of your maybes look a lot more like yeses.

”But what if I’m wrong?” Then you’ll be wrong faster, find out sooner, and fix it quicker than the man who’s still deciding. Being wrong is not the disaster you’ve built it up to be. On a two-way door, being wrong costs you a small correction. Being frozen costs you the whole opportunity. Wrong-and-moving beats right-and-parked, over and over, for your entire career.

”Big decisions deserve real time.” They do, and I already told you to give them that. Sort the door. The one-way doors get your patience. But quit smuggling your small reversible decisions into that category so you can feel justified in stalling. That’s not caution, that’s fear wearing caution’s jacket.

”I like to sleep on it.” One night, sure. Sleeping on it is real, and a fresh morning does sharpen a call. But “sleep on it” has a way of turning into eleven nights, and by then you’re not sleeping on it, you’re hiding under it. One sleep. Then the clock runs out and you decide.

The most successful men you know are not smarter than you. A lot of them aren’t even more talented. But almost every one of them decides faster, because they figured out early that the cost of a wrong call is usually small and the cost of no call is usually huge. They stopped confusing motion with recklessness and stillness with wisdom. Sometimes the wise thing and the fast thing are the exact same thing, and the careful-looking man in the hallway is just losing slowly.

Certainty is not coming. Stop waiting for it. Sort the door, set the clock, decide at seventy, and commit. Do that consistently and you’ll move through the world at a pace that makes other men dizzy, and you’ll be right more often too, because you’ll have run more experiments than they’ve even started.

Your move today: That decision you’ve been sitting on, the one you thought about when you started reading this. Sort the door right now. If it’s two-way, and it almost certainly is, put a clock on it. Decided by tomorrow at noon. Then decide, close the loop, and feel the weight come off. You’ll wonder why you carried it for so long.

Refined. Relentless. Unapologetic.

Marcus