You're at a restaurant, and you've ordered the salmon. But wait—the pasta looks amazing on the menu too. You flag down the server and switch. Then you spot someone's steak at the next table. Another change? By now, you're not optimizing your dinner. You're just exhausting yourself and annoying everyone around you.

This isn't about food. It's about a pattern that sabotages decisions far more consequential than tonight's entrée. Constant revision feels like careful thinking, but it often produces worse outcomes than committing to imperfect choices. The psychological and practical costs of perpetual course-correction are sneakier than you'd expect—and understanding them might be the most important decision skill you develop.

Every time you reverse a decision, you pay a toll. There's the obvious stuff: time spent reconsidering, energy explaining the change to others, sometimes literal money. But the sneaky costs are worse. Each revision resets your learning clock. You never discover whether your original choice would have worked because you abandoned it before the data came in.

Here's the compounding problem: revision costs aren't linear. Your first change might cost you an hour of rethinking. Your second change costs that hour plus the cognitive overhead of tracking what you've already tried. By your fifth revision, you're spending more mental energy managing your decision history than actually moving forward. Researchers call this decision fatigue amplification—each change depletes the resources you need for the next choice.

There's also a social cost most people ignore. Others stop taking your commitments seriously. Your team hesitates to execute because they're waiting for the next pivot. Your partner stops planning around your stated preferences. Constant revision trains everyone around you to discount what you say. That credibility deficit follows you into future decisions where you genuinely need people's trust and cooperation.

Takeaway

Before changing any decision, force yourself to calculate the full cost: time lost, learning abandoned, credibility spent, and the mental overhead of managing yet another revision. If you can't articulate these costs clearly, you probably shouldn't switch.

Sticking with decisions grants access to advantages that constant revisers never experience. The most powerful: compound learning. When you commit to a direction, you start accumulating specific knowledge about how that path actually works. You discover the unexpected benefits, learn the real obstacles, and develop skills tailored to your choice. Switchers restart this learning process every time they change course.

There's a psychological benefit too. Commitment reduces what psychologists call option anxiety—the low-grade stress of keeping alternatives mentally alive. When you genuinely close doors, your brain stops expending energy on phantom possibilities and redirects that attention toward making your actual situation work. Studies show committed individuals report higher satisfaction with objectively identical outcomes compared to people who kept their options open.

Perhaps most importantly, commitment changes how others respond to you. When people believe you're truly invested in a direction, they offer resources, introductions, and support they'd never provide to someone who might bail next week. The world rewards conviction with cooperation. Your colleague shares a critical contact. Your investor offers follow-on funding. Your partner plans a future together. These commitment dividends are invisible to people still shopping for better options.

Takeaway

Commitment isn't just about avoiding revision costs—it's about accessing benefits that only appear after you've stopped looking for exits. The best opportunities often reveal themselves to people who've demonstrated they're staying.

None of this means you should stubbornly persist with genuinely terrible decisions. The skill is distinguishing between productive commitment and foolish stubbornness. Here's a framework: revise based on new information, not new feelings. If you've learned something concrete that changes the calculus—the market shifted, your health situation changed, a key assumption proved false—that's a legitimate trigger. But if you're just tired, anxious, or momentarily attracted to alternatives, that's not new information. That's decision fatigue talking.

Try the 48-hour rule before any significant revision. When the urge to change hits, write down exactly why you want to switch and what new information justifies it. Wait 48 hours. If your reasoning still holds and you can identify specific new data, proceed. If you can't articulate what's genuinely different, you're experiencing what researchers call grass-is-greener noise—the brain's tendency to manufacture doubt about any current situation.

Finally, set revision budgets in advance. Before starting any major decision, declare how many changes you'll allow yourself. "I'll try this approach for six months before reconsidering" or "I get two pivots maximum on this project." This pre-commitment removes revision decisions from your emotional state in the moment and forces you to use your change allowance strategically. You'll find yourself much more thoughtful about when to spend your revision tokens.

Takeaway

Create a personal revision policy: only change based on concrete new information, implement a 48-hour waiting period for significant switches, and set a limited revision budget before you begin. Treat changes as a scarce resource, not a free option.

The goal isn't to become inflexible—it's to become strategically stubborn. Most decisions deserve more commitment than we give them, not because they're perfect, but because the alternative is decision quicksand: constant motion that gets you nowhere while exhausting everyone involved.

Your next imperfect decision, fully committed to, will almost certainly outperform your next perfect decision, perpetually revised. The path forward isn't finding the right choice—it's choosing the path and then making it right.