You're staring at your inbox, paralyzed. Three decisions need answers by end of day, but you're stuck analyzing the first one. Meanwhile, your colleague fires off choices like a tennis ball machine—and somehow, things work out fine for them. What do they know that you don't?

Here's the uncomfortable truth: in most situations, a good decision made quickly beats a perfect decision made slowly. The world doesn't pause while you deliberate. Opportunities close, contexts shift, and the information you're waiting for often never arrives. The real skill isn't making flawless choices—it's knowing how to move fast without leaving wreckage behind.

Not all decisions deserve the same investment of time and mental energy. Yet most of us treat every choice like it's equally important. We agonize over lunch options with the same intensity we'd bring to a career move. This is backwards. The first step to faster decisions is recognizing that most decisions are reversible, and the cost of delay often exceeds the cost of being slightly wrong.

Think of decisions on a spectrum. On one end: high-stakes, irreversible choices—signing a mortgage, accepting a job in another country, major surgery. These deserve deliberation. On the other end: low-stakes, easily reversed choices—which project to tackle first today, what to order for dinner, whether to attend a meeting. For these, speed is almost always more valuable than optimization.

The trap is treating reversible decisions as permanent. Ask yourself: What's the cost of being wrong? If you can course-correct easily, decide now and move on. Jeff Bezos calls these "two-way door" decisions—you can walk back through if needed. Reserve your analytical firepower for the one-way doors, the choices you'll have to live with regardless.

Takeaway

Before deliberating, ask: Is this a one-way or two-way door? Two-way doors should be walked through quickly. Save your careful analysis for the doors that lock behind you.

When you can't predict the outcome, stop predicting and start testing. Analysis has diminishing returns—after a certain point, more thinking just produces more uncertainty dressed up as insight. The alternative is to run cheap experiments that give you actual data instead of educated guesses.

The key is making your tests small enough that failure is affordable. Want to know if your team would benefit from standing meetings? Try it for one week with one team, not a company-wide policy change. Considering a career pivot? Take on a side project in the new field before quitting your job. Thinking about moving to a new city? Rent there for a month before selling your house. Small bets, fast feedback.

This approach works because it converts abstract speculation into concrete experience. You stop asking "What if this goes wrong?" and start asking "What did I learn?" Each experiment narrows the uncertainty, and you make the big decision with real information rather than hypotheticals. The fastest path to clarity often runs through action, not contemplation.

Takeaway

When analysis stalls, design the smallest possible experiment that would give you useful information. Real-world feedback beats theoretical prediction almost every time.

Here's a counterintuitive truth: you can afford to decide faster when you've invested in making mistakes survivable. The real constraint on decision speed isn't the fear of being wrong—it's the fear of being catastrophically wrong. Remove the catastrophe, and speed becomes natural.

This means building recovery systems before you need them. In practical terms: keep financial reserves so one bad purchase doesn't ruin you. Maintain relationships so one awkward conversation doesn't burn bridges permanently. Document your work so one wrong direction doesn't mean starting from zero. Create checkpoints in big projects so you can catch errors early. The goal isn't to avoid mistakes—it's to make mistakes cheap.

Organizations that move fast have institutionalized this principle. They deploy code in small batches so bugs affect fewer users. They run pilot programs before full launches. They build rollback capabilities into every system. You can apply the same thinking personally: before making a quick decision, spend thirty seconds asking "If this goes wrong, what's my recovery plan?" If you have one, decide and move.

Takeaway

Speed comes from safety nets, not recklessness. Invest in making mistakes recoverable, and you'll naturally become more decisive because the stakes of any single choice drop dramatically.

Decision velocity isn't about being impulsive or careless. It's about matching your decision process to the actual stakes involved, using experiments instead of endless analysis, and building systems that let you recover when you're wrong. Most of us are dramatically slower than we need to be.

Start tomorrow with one shift: identify your next reversible decision and make it in under two minutes. Notice how the sky doesn't fall. Practice this until speed on small choices becomes automatic, then watch how much mental space opens up for the decisions that truly matter.