The Cost of Being Right

A guy I know sat on a hiring decision for eleven weeks.

Good operator. Runs a services business north of four million. He had two finalists for a director role, and he could not pull the trigger. He ran a third interview. Then a fourth. He built a scorecard. He asked his wife. He asked me twice. He asked a consultant he pays too much money to.

Eleven weeks.

Here’s the part that should make you wince. During those eleven weeks, the role sat empty. He absorbed the work himself, which meant he stopped selling. Revenue flattened. One of the finalists took another offer. The other one, the one he eventually hired, walked in already knowing she was the leftover.

I asked him later what a bad hire would have cost him. He said maybe sixty grand, all in, if he had to cut bait at six months.

The eleven weeks of indecision cost him more than that. Not close.

And this is a smart man. This is a man who reads. He didn’t fail because he lacked information. He failed because he was trying to be right, when the job was to be decisive at the correct price.

That distinction is the whole game, and almost nobody is taught it.

Somewhere along the way you absorbed the idea that a good decision is a correct decision. That the mark of a serious man is that his calls pan out.

It’s a comfortable belief. It’s also backwards, and it’s costing you.

A good decision is one that got the right amount of thinking for what was actually at stake. That’s it. Sometimes that’s thirty seconds. Sometimes that’s thirty days. The failure mode isn’t being wrong. The failure mode is spending Tier 4 deliberation on a Tier 1 question, over and over, until your calendar is a graveyard of open loops and your team has quietly learned that nothing gets settled until you’ve circled it six times.

Look at your last month honestly. How much of your best thinking went to questions where the two options were basically the same? Which vendor. Which format. Which of two candidates who both interviewed well. Meanwhile the real question, the one about whether the business model still works, got twenty distracted minutes in the car.

You’re not short on judgment. You’re spending it in the wrong places.

The fix isn’t to decide faster across the board. Speed applied uniformly is just a different flavor of stupid. The fix is to sort first, then set a budget.

Every decision you face lives in one of four tiers. Learn to place them in about five seconds and you’ll get years of your life back.

Tier 1: Coin Flips. The options are close enough that the difference between them is smaller than the cost of figuring out which is better. Where to eat. Which of two similar vendors. What color. Which of two proposals that both work.

The rule: decide in under sixty seconds, alone, and never revisit it. If you catch yourself reopening a Tier 1, that’s not diligence. That’s anxiety wearing a suit.

Tier 2: Cheap Bets. Reversible, and the cost of being wrong is under a number you’ve set in advance. For most operators reading this, that number is somewhere between two and ten thousand dollars, or a month of one person’s time. Trying a new tool. Testing a channel. Running a pilot with one client.

The rule: twenty four hours, maximum. One person you trust gets a look. Then you run it as an experiment with a hard review date on the calendar. Not “let’s see how it goes.” A date.

Tier 3: Heavy Doors. Reversible, but reversing costs real money, real time, or real credibility. A senior hire. A pricing change. Restructuring a team. Signing a twelve month contract.

The rule: one week. Write the case down on one page, because the writing is where you find out whether you actually have a reason or just a feeling. Three people see it. And you run a pre-mortem: assume it’s eighteen months later and this failed badly. What happened? Write that down too. It takes ten minutes and it catches things no amount of staring at a spreadsheet will.

Tier 4: One Way Streets. Irreversible, or reversible only at a cost that would change your life. Selling the company. Taking on a partner. Personal guarantees. Anything that touches your name permanently.

The rule: thirty days minimum. Written thesis. Explicit kill criteria set in advance, meaning you name the conditions under which you’d walk away, before you’re emotionally invested. Outside counsel who has no financial interest in your yes. And you sleep on it twice, at least a week apart, because the version of you at 11pm on a Tuesday is not the same man as the version of you at 7am on a Saturday.

Four tiers. That’s the whole taxonomy.

Here’s what you’ll notice the first time you run this honestly: the vast majority of what’s eating you is Tier 1 and Tier 2. You’ve been treating your whole docket like Tier 3.

Sorting is only half of it. Here’s how you actually install this, in order.

One. Dump the docket. Sit down with a blank page and write out every open decision you’re carrying. Not tasks. Decisions. Things where you haven’t chosen yet and some part of your brain is still holding the tab open. Business and personal both. Most men land somewhere between fifteen and forty. Seeing the number is the first jolt.

Two. Tier each one in a single pass. Gut call, no debate, one to four beside each item. If you find yourself arguing with yourself about whether something is a 2 or a 3, it’s a 2. Real Tier 3s announce themselves.

Three. Clear every Tier 1 tonight. All of them. Right now, before you go to bed. This will take you twenty minutes and it will feel absurdly good, because you’ve been carrying some of those for months.

Four. Give every Tier 2 a decide-by date and a name. The date goes on the calendar. The name is the one person you’ll run it past. Then it’s done being a burden, because it has an owner and a deadline.

Five. Calendar the Tier 3s and 4s properly. These need actual blocks, not intentions. A Tier 3 gets a ninety minute block for the one-pager and a second block for the pre-mortem. A Tier 4 gets a recurring block across a month. If it doesn’t have a block, you’re not deciding it. You’re just worrying about it.

Six. Run a weekly docket review. Twenty minutes, same time every week. New decisions get tiered. Old ones get checked. Anything that’s been sitting more than two weeks without movement gets either decided or explicitly killed. “Not now, revisit in Q4” is a decision. “I’ll get to it” is not.

That’s the system. It costs you twenty minutes a week and it will change the texture of your entire operation, because the single biggest tax on a growing business is the founder’s unresolved queue.

“Some Tier 1s turn out to matter.” Sure. Occasionally you’ll snap-decide something small and it’ll bite you. You’ll be wrong on a handful of low-stakes calls per year. In exchange you get your judgment, your calendar, and your attention back for the decisions that actually move the number. Take that trade every single time and it isn’t close.

“My team needs me to think it through.” Your team needs you to decide. I’ve never once seen a team damaged by a leader who made a merely-okay call quickly and owned it. I’ve seen dozens damaged by a leader who left things ambiguous while he deliberated. Ambiguity from the top is more expensive than an imperfect answer, because your people can’t work around an imperfect answer, but they absolutely will work around silence, usually in five different directions.

“I don’t have time to sort my decisions.” You don’t have time not to. The eleven weeks my guy spent on that hire is time he spent anyway. He just spent it badly, in five minute increments, at three in the morning, with none of it counting.

“This feels cold. Some things deserve care.” Absolutely. That’s exactly why Tiers 3 and 4 get a full protocol. The whole point of ruthlessly clearing Tier 1 and 2 is so you have something left for the decisions that deserve you.

You cannot budget your decisions if you have no idea where your hours are actually going.

Most men are running on a fictional version of their own week. They believe they spent Tuesday on strategy. They spent Tuesday in Slack. The gap between what you think your week looked like and what it actually looked like is usually somewhere north of thirty percent, and it always runs in the flattering direction.

I use Rize for this. It runs quietly in the background and tells you the truth about your time without you having to remember anything or start a timer like a chump. After two weeks you’ll have an honest picture of where your attention actually went, and I’ll warn you now, the first report stings a little. That sting is the useful part. You can’t budget a resource you’re lying to yourself about.

Being right is not the job. Being right is what happens sometimes, when you’ve done the job well, and it’s noisy enough that you shouldn’t grade yourself on it.

The job is matching the weight of your thinking to the weight of the question. Most of what’s clogging your head deserves sixty seconds and a shrug. A small number of things deserve a month and a written thesis. The tragedy of high performers is that they give everything the same anxious middle treatment, and end up simultaneously slow on the small stuff and shallow on the big stuff.

Sort it. Budget it. Move.

Blank page. Twenty minutes. Write down every open decision you’re carrying, tier each one, and then clear every single Tier 1 before you go to sleep tonight.

Do not skip the “before you go to sleep” part. The relief is the proof, and you need to feel it once to believe the rest of this.

Refined. Relentless. Unapologetic.

Marcus