🏆 Best.
Or: building a start-up is a commitment in walking away from ever making the right or best decision.
“But how do you know it’s the right decision?”
I’m asked this question, or some version of it countless times a month. Whether in idle conversation or during office hours with first time founders.
And every time I say: “You don’t. You won’t. And if making the “right” decision is really important to you and that uncertainty weighs on you, then I’d reconsider the line of work.”
I don’t mean to be harsh. But this is a truth we all have to contend with.
Start-ups are hard because there is never a clear, totally obvious answer. You as the founder are never lauded for your thousand decisions made in murky data but certainly will have to live the price should the consequences of your decisions lead all astray.
It’s another way start-ups are a parallel experience to parenthood - big, consequential decisions everywhere you look. Incompletely, often contradictory data. Massive impact that you’ll only ever realize down the road sometime.
Some people like to split their odds and have more stable, “knowable” jobs once they have the chaos of kids.
I like to double down on the unknown. Build the muscle of operating in the murk.
And the first step is: walking away from any false bar of a right or best decision. That bar is a mirage, aimed to make you obsess and dither and delay.
Instead there is only: the decision made given these circumstances and this data + continuous data reads + quick action.
If you can’t know that your decision is the right one then you also have to let each decision earn its keep. Make it prove that it’s the right one with data and confirmation, while having faith keep the panic down during the short intervals of data collection.
And if it’s not? As it too often isn’t? Quick, decisive course correction and a new decision based on new data.
Over time - this baby step decision making allows you to make finer and finer adjustments, allowing you to approach some theoretical “best” but in a much more concrete and trustable way.
Just know that you’ll never really know. And that’s okay. Your mix of faith and finding out is a much better guide than any mythical bar of “best”.