I was recently told by a talent leader in startups about their strategy to hire the junior role first before the senior one. This way, they can tailor the senior hire based on the specific gaps of the junior employee. This felt counterintuitive because I have heard that you should hire the leader first so they can build their team how they envision it. However, when it comes down to it, the junior role is the easier decision to make – and to correct if needed.

I mirror that conversation to some decisions I have made in the past. Often, I take too long to make hard decisions because I was being precious about making the right decision and that the choice is irreversible. But this ‘reversibility’ really comes down to a willingness to make mistakes. I confined myself to having no room for mistakes, even though, every mistake can be corrected.

This concept is reminiscent of Amazon’s One-Way and Two-Way Doors. Two-way doors or reversible decisions are made quickly, because you can always reverse it later. Life is an experiment! It’s okay to be wrong. You just have to be confident in your ability to adapt and adjust. 

We also tend to make a mistake in judging whether a decision is reversible, but here’s a food for thought, when you look back at your mistakes in your younger years, how many of them did you think were permanent? For example, choosing the wrong major for college. When we were young, we thought this was an end-all be-all decision. Afterwards, you realize that your major in college doesn’t define you and with time, you went to the career track you wanted. 

To help me go through this concept and view the decision outcomes objectively, I used Tim Ferriss’s Fear-Setting Framework (written or video). It can be summarized to writing 3 things:

1. What problems might occur if I choose X, and how can I prevent or repair it?
2. What are the benefits of attempting or partially succeeding in X?
3. What are the cost of not doing X?

By making the corrective and preventive actions very clear, Tim Ferriss brings objectivity to our perceived ‘permanent’ decisions. By articulating the last 2 questions, I found the problems I wrote in to be inconsequential compared to the benefits of even attempting the action.

My co-worker Kevin Nguyen likes to say, ‘if no baby is dying, you can make the decision quickly.’

Maybe the current hard decisions you’re stalling on because you think they’re end-all be-all are actually more reversible than you think. We’re humans who adapt and change and we can always take corrective actions later on. So, believe in your ability to pivot and take faster decisions. I challenge you to think of what might go wrong and how you can recover from it. If you think about it, it seems easy to recover from, doesn’t it?