Most decisions don’t deserve much thought. Make them fast, move on. You’ll be right often enough, and wrong cheaply.
A handful can’t be reversed.
- The lease.
- The hire.
- The price.
- The partner.
Those ones quietly set the next ten years, and you rarely know which was which until much later.
I’ve made a few. A price rise I couldn’t walk back once it was out. A business I helped build and didn’t own.
What I eventually noticed wasn’t that I decided badly. It was that I couldn’t remember how I’d decided. By the time the outcome arrived I had quietly rewritten the reasoning to match it — shrewd when it worked, careless when it didn’t. Neither version was true. Neither taught me anything.
So I started writing the reasoning down before the outcome existed. The same five questions, every time, on anything I couldn’t undo.
What’s in it
Page one is the sheet. Five questions, one page. Print it or don’t — they work on the back of an envelope.
Page two is one of my own decisions run through them, end to end, including the part I’d do differently.
It only earns its keep on choices you can’t take back. Use it on everything and you’ll turn small decisions into big ones.