(Almost) No Decision Is Final—So Stop Acting Like They Are
At fifty years old, I walked into a tattoo parlor for the first time. (Second, technically, but the first was to sit with someone else while she got her first tattoo).
My artist, a woman half my age with intricate ink climbing both her arms, greeted me with a smile. I found her through Instagram, paid her deposit, and then waited nearly six months for the date of my actual appointment. She knew it was my first time.
The bunch of trainees practicing their fine lines on what looked like pork trotters, on the other hand. They didn’t. One of them—I kid you not—looked up from her work, caught my eye, and said, “First time?”
She read my nervousness like tarot cards.
I’d been thinking about this tattoo for ten whole years. 3652 days of a debate with myself. That’s a lot of days.
See, I love tattoos. They’re one of my favorite art forms. I’ve watched every season of Ink Master, that horrifically antagonistic art competition, and I follow a bunch of tattoo artists on Instagram. I’m blown away by what master artists can do on skin.
When people find this out—and find out that I didn’t have any of my own—they invariably ask why. And for decades, my response has always been, “I just don’t know what I’d want on my body for the rest of my life.”
And then, on June 3, 2024, I lost one of the most steadfast presences in my life. Max the cat was 20 years old, and I loved him deeply. Over two decades, he’d made his home with me in five different apartments in four different cities on two different continents. He’d walked with me through a countless call nights, more than a few job changes. Heck, he’d even survived my marriage.
In 2014, at ten years old, he faced a medical scare, that he sailed right through.
But that was when my answer to the tattoo questions started to change. I knew that if ever I got a tattoo, it would be of Max.
Still, that remained a hypothetical. I considered it often. Followed pet portrait artists. But never acted.
A few years ago, Max had been trained him to jump over my arm to get his treats every morning. And then one day, in August of 2023, he stopped jumping. He’d come up to my arm, bounce himself a little bit, and then give up.
Over the next few weeks, he needed my arm to get closer and closer to the floor before he’d eventually just step over it. The vet diagnosed Max with a spinal tumor and gave him a few weeks to live.
He defied the odds, that glorious little cat, and gave me almost an entire extra year with him.
Max the cat
I now have a gorgeous tattoo of Max on my left forearm.
The Two Types of Decisions
In a now-famous letter to Amazon shareholders, Jeff Bezos articulated a really important decision-making maxim.
(Side note, I hate that it’s come to be called the Bezos Framework, because that rapacious bald man wasn’t the first—or even the most eloquent—to promulgate it. Still, he’s the most famous person to do so, so I guess it’s his now).
I’m going to say something I don’t often say in my posts: unless you master this one framework, you’ll ALWAYS struggle to make good decisions.
I mean that. It’s that powerful of a framework. Here it is:
In his letter to his shareholders, Bezos identified two types of decisions that organizations—and, by extension, individuals—face:
Type 1 decisions are consequential and irreversible. They are one-way doors. Once you walk through, you can’t get back to where you were before. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. “These decisions,” he wrote, “must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation.”
Type 2 decisions, on the other hand, are changeable and reversible. They’re doors that you can walk through, and then walk back through the other way. It may cost something, but they are not irreversible.
Type 2 decisions can be suboptimal. Read that second sentence again. Type 2 decisions can be suboptimal.
This. Is. Incredibly. Crucial. Not recognizing this can have massive consequences.
Life has very few Type 1 decisions
Most decisions are Type 2 decisions. Almost every decision you think is Type 1? It’s probably Type 2.
It’s probably a decision that you don’t have to get perfectly right. It’s most likely a decision that can be suboptimal!
To quote (reluctantly) from Bezos again:
Many decisions are reversible, two-way doors. Those decisions can use a light-weight process. For those, so what if you’re wrong?
Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.
We need to be clear with ourselves about what makes a decision truly Type 1, truly irreversible. And it’s not the things our culture has told us.
Tattoos are sometimes presented as the paragon of Type 1 decisions. I fell for that propaganda. That’s why, for a decade before Max died, I would fixate on the fact that I didn’t want a tattoo because I wasn’t sure I wanted something on my body for the rest of my life. That’s Type 1 talk. For a Type 2 decision
Lasers exist. Long sleeves exist. Coverups exist.
Tattoos? Not Type 1.
Marriage? Also nope. When I got married, we stood in front of 120 people and promised to stay together till death did us part. And then she filed for divorce 17 years later.
On the other hand: Having children? Yep, that one’s Type 1. There’s no control-Z for parenthood. After all, even though her kids have been out of the house for literal decades, my mother still worries about us. She will always, fundamentally, be our mother. Parenthood is a Type 1 decision.
Having to get a body part amputated? Type 1. Prosthetics or not, losing your leg is losing your leg.
Photo by Icarius.jpeg on Unsplash
And the way we make Type 2 decisions is way too costly
Most decisions are Type 2.
And we treat them like they’re Type 1. We absolutely agonize over them.
Taking a new job? Type 2. If it doesn’t work out, you can find another one. And yet, how much time have you spent wondering whether you’re making the “right” decision? How much time have you spent trying to minimize your uncertainty by gathering more information—all while not acting?
When I was offered a one year job contract in Singapore back in the late 1990s, it took me nearly a year to make the decision to go — and then I ended up delaying it by another year.
Ludicrous, right? I spent two whole years deciding to take a job that I’d only be in for a year.
Moving to a new city? Type 2. Cities aren’t going anywhere. You’ll always be able to move to that small house in the country if it turns out you’re not a city person.
Starting a business? Type 2. If my coaching business were ever to fold, it would be costly. But it wouldn’t be a Type 1 decision. Businesses can be closed, pivots can be made, lessons can be learned.
Yet we treat these Type 2 decisions with the same weight—sometimes more weight—than the truly irreversible ones. I see this in my clients—and myself!—all the time.
So, so many of my clients, all burnt out health professionals, have been stuck for literal years in jobs that cost them their souls (more on that next week), all because they’re viewing their careers as Type 1 decisions.
This delay has consequences. Waiting for 90% information, when you should have acted at 70%, is more costly than we think.
The Type 1 decision isn’t action, it’s inaction.
Type 2 Indecision Can Lead To Type 1 Outcomes
Every day that a smoker delays quitting is a Type 2 decision. It’s reversible. He could always quit tomorrow. With each cigarette he chooses to smoke, a smoker is not deciding to quit—which is, fundamentally, a decision not to quit.
Because indecision is a decision.
But Type 2 Indecision can lead to massive, irreversible effects. With smoking it’s pretty obvious: the cumulative impact on the smoker’s lungs, his cardiovascular system, and even his DNA is what leads smokers to have a one hundred-times greater risk than non-smokers of certain lung cancers.
Type 2 Indecision isn’t limited to tobacco.
A toxic relationship? Every day that you stay in it is a Type 2 Indecision. You could always leave the next day (or he could miraculously have a change of heart). Soon a day leads to several, to months, to years. And a decade of Type 2 Indecision? That can have lasting impacts, both mental and physical. The body, after all, keeps the score.
It’s the same with soul-crushing jobs. Staying in for “just one more year”? That’s a Type 2 Indecision that can end up having Type 1 consequences. That irreplaceable year of your life is gone, and with it, the person you’ll eventually become changes. Irreversibly.
My medical colleagues face this type of indecision constantly. We think we’re keeping their options open by staying in positions that slowly drain our souls. “I’ll leave next year,” we say. “After I pay off the loans.” “After the kids graduate.” “After I vest in my 401k.”
(All reasonable considerations, which I’ll discuss next week.)
But each year that passes, each option that’s “kept open” is a Type 2 Indecision with Type 1 consequences.
How, Then, Should We Decide?
To summarize, then:
Type 1 decisions: exceedingly rare
Type 2 decisions: exceedingly common
Treating a Type 2 decision like Type 1 can have Type 1 consequences.
Or to put it differently:
Very few decisions are final. Treating them like they are can be costly
1. How do we make Type 1 decisions well?
Slowly, methodically, and with a lot of thought. These truly are the big decisions in our lives. They’re the ones decisions that fundamentally alter us. They’re the ones that cannot be reversed.
For them, we need to accord them appropriate gravity BUT without paralysis.
We need to accept that Type 1 decisions require a different kind of courage—not the courage to be right, but the courage to be changed. The courage to accept that once we walk through that door, we can’t go back — and that that’s exactly the point.
2. How do we make Type 2 decisions well?
We make them quickly. Make them with high judgment.
We use them as experiments.
We try things.
We accept that we’ll be wrong.
And we adjust.
Every Type 2 decision is an opportunity to gather data for your (real) Type 1 choices. Every reversible experiment teaches you something about what you want from your irreversible commitments.
That tattoo I agonized over for ten years? The mental energy I spent deliberating could have been used for so many other things.
Agonizing over Type 2 decisions isn’t even a helpful strategy for dealing with uncertainty. I mean, even after deliberating forever, even after putting down two deposits with two different artists (and letting one go to waste), and even after getting a tattoo I absolutely love, I still doubted I made the right choice.
I would look at my tattoo in the shower and have this flush of “holy crap what have I done?” I literally had to remind myself that lasers exist if I ever changed my mind.
Treating a Type 2 decision like Type 1 didn’t even take the edge off the uncertainty!
Sometimes You Need A Little Clarity
Every day you don’t act on something—every day you choose not to choose, every day of Type 2 Indecision—another day you’re building up a debt that might, in the end, turn a Type 2 decision into Type 1.
Chances are, you have 70% of the information you need. Chances are you’re waiting for the 90%, not trusting yourself that you can handle whatever you face on the other side of the decision.
Understanding this may not make your decisions easier. But it will make them clearer. And clarity, in my experience, is the precursor to courage.
Sometimes, it takes a little external guidance, a little outside objectivity, to cut through the decision-making habits you’ve formed.
Not because someone else can make your decisions for you, but because when you’re not sure what kind of door you’re standing out—a one-way door, or one you could walk back through—it helps to have someone who’s walked through a few of their own.
Someone who can help you distinguish between the caution for change and the wariness of fear.
As a coach who’s helped scores of health professionals navigate their decisions—leaving medicine, changing careers, addressing burnout, redesigning their lives—I’ve seen the transformation that comes from finally understanding which decisions deserve months of deliberation and which deserve minutes.
And I’ve learned that we’re all probably spending too much time on our Type 2 decisions—and not enough time on our Type 1s.
Every day you don’t act on your dreams is a Type 2 decision with Type 1 consequences. Every moment you spend agonizing over the reversible is a moment stolen from the irreversible.
So what’s it going to be, friend?
Will you spend ten years deciding on your metaphorical tattoo while letting life’s truly irreversible decisions happen by default?
Or will you finally walk through the reversible doors and see the courageous person you are on the other side?
If you’re standing at what feels like a one-way door—or if you’re not sure which kind of door you’re facing—I’m here to help you navigate your Type 1 decisions with clarity and courage. Because the biggest risk isn’t making the wrong choice. It’s not recognizing which choices truly matter. Here’s how to work with me:
→ SUMMER SALE. For the month of July ONLY, the first fifteen health professionals to sign up for my master course on getting out of burnout get the whole thing for 50% off! I’ve never given a deal this big, and probably never will again. Click here to apply!
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