The Decisions We Should Only Make Once

There was a season in my life when I worked as a management consultant in Nairobi.

I would not pretend that I was the finest consultant the city had ever produced, but I was competent enough to earn a place in boardrooms with people who had spent decades building successful businesses.

It was an interesting profession.

On many occasions I found myself standing before executives who knew their industries infinitely better than I did. They understood their customers, their markets, their competitors and the daily realities of running their organisations. I was the outsider.

Yet they had invited me to teach them.

That always amused me.

The longer I stayed in consulting, the more I realised that our value rarely came from knowing more than our clients. It came from seeing familiar problems through unfamiliar eyes.

Consultants read. A lot.

We devoured books, journals and case studies because we had the luxury of studying while our clients had the burden of running businesses.

We spoke confidently about Kaizen, Six Sigma, Just-in-Time manufacturing, the Balanced Scorecard, Management by Walking Around, Peter Drucker, Stephen Covey and whichever management philosophy was enjoying its fifteen minutes of fame.

Looking back, I smile.

Sometimes I suspect consultants spend their lives translating common sense into expensive PowerPoint presentations.

But every now and then, hidden among all the theories and management jargon, you stumble upon an idea that quietly changes your life.

One such idea has stayed with me for decades.

I cannot remember with certainty whether I first heard it from Zig Ziglar or another sales trainer. My old notebooks probably know the answer better than I do.

The lesson itself, however, has never left me.

Successful people eliminate unnecessary decisions.

At first, I dismissed it.

Surely success comes from making good decisions, not fewer ones.

Then life began proving the point.

Human beings have an extraordinary ability to negotiate with themselves.

Especially when comfort is involved.

If every morning you ask yourself whether you feel like going to work, sooner or later your pillow will produce a remarkably convincing business case.

If your commitment to exercise depends on your mood, the weather suddenly becomes a senior consultant with very persuasive arguments.

If you wait until you feel inspired before beginning important work, inspiration develops an unfortunate habit of arriving after the deadline.

The problem is rarely laziness.

The problem is that we keep reopening decisions that should have been settled long ago.

Highly disciplined people seem to understand this instinctively.

They do not wake up asking whether they should save money.

That decision was made months ago.

They do not negotiate about whether they should honour their commitments.

They simply honour them.

They remove the debate.

And once the debate disappears, so do many of the excuses.

Over the years I have quietly borrowed that principle.

It has simplified my life more than almost anything else.

Alongside it, I have adopted another question that has rescued me from hesitation more times than I can count.

Whenever I find myself paralysed by fear, I ask a simple question.

"What do I really have to lose?"

The answer is often uncomfortable.

If I never make the phone call, I have already lost the opportunity.

If I never submit the proposal, I have already lost the contract.

If I never ask the question, I have already accepted ignorance.

If I never apologise, I have already allowed the relationship to drift further away.

Doing nothing feels safe.

In reality, it quietly guarantees failure while disguising itself as caution.

That has become one of life's great ironies.

We spend so much energy protecting ourselves from rejection that we unknowingly reject ourselves first.

The older I become, the less I believe success belongs only to the most intelligent people.

More often, it belongs to those who settle the important decisions once and refuse to renegotiate them every morning.

Integrity is one of those decisions.

Hard work is another.

Keeping your word.

Showing up.

Learning continuously.

Being kind.

None of these should depend on how we feel before breakfast.

Life offers enough difficult choices without us repeatedly debating the ones we have already answered.

Perhaps that is one of the quiet secrets of an effective life.

Decide carefully.

Decide deliberately.

Then stop asking yourself the same question.

Because every time we reopen a good decision, we give comfort another chance to vote.

And comfort, I have discovered, campaigns far more aggressively than purpose ever does.