#57 - The Importance of Making Strong Choices
Advice a past boss gave me, and ways to apply it to yourself and to your work
One of my favorite managers ever, Brittny Adams (you rock, Brittny!!) once gave me some of the most valuable advice I’ve ever received. I always admired her lens on life, and she’s a wonderful human being outside of the fact that she is also a total boss on the professional front. I’ve long been trying to find ways that we might work together again… There is still time!
Anyways there’s context around this advice (below) that I’ll add in a bit, but the advice was simple, enduring, and powerful:
Make Strong Choices.
Context
I was approaching the end of a really amazing professional experience and was completely torn up over which next role/job to take. Each role was fundamentally different and would unlock slightly different pathways. The cultures were different. The office locations were different. The types of problems they worked on were for the most part different. And, at that time, much of my identity was wrapped up in my career / title / group, so picking one was akin to choosing a life path.
The odd part about this situation was that I had 4-6 months of lead time to make a decision. That is, I knew in January that I’d need to make a decision in May/June, which == a lot of processing time! For another soul this would’ve been delightful. For me, the time was welcomed, but it was too much time, and it ended up leading into something I’ve experienced no less than 15 times in my life: obsessive processing over a decision.
I ended up hitting the point of diminishing returns very quickly. Four pages of writing / processing, turned into hours awake at night, which turned into random thinking during the day, which turned into asking close friends for their perspectives (this was super healthy actually) —> which gave me more thoughts to process in the middle of the night.
After three months, I had made my decision… three times. “I’m going to do job A!” … then two weeks later, “i’m going to do job B!” etc. etc.
Invariably I became intellectually exhausted by the exercise and resigned myself to this processing stage i’ll call: who freaking knows what’s going to happen?
Fun stuff: this is the view from my old office. It was pretty insane to see this every day, and it was an incredible place to be in from a career POV, but you always knew that what happened after that situation was up to you to make work.
Enter the wisdom of Brittny
At the point of being wholly burned out by this decision, I confided in my manager at the time. I can’t remember if it was during a walk, or over lunch, or over coffee, or just on a quick phone catch up, but I will never forget her telling me that,
“Michael, you know, you can’t go wrong here. Both of these are really sweet options. Sometimes in life you just to make strong choices and just commit 100% to your choice and don’t look back.”
… Don’t question what you’ve decided to do, because it IS the choice. This single piece of advice has made so many other aspects of life and work better.
How to apply this notion of Making Stronger Choices
When applied to your life, I think this is best applied after you have done some degree of processing whereby you can reasonably say, “I’ve covered almost everything” in terms of analysis. You’ve talked to enough other people to get their thoughts… You’ve had some time to think about the decision… You’ve maybe read up on it… These days, maybe you’ve asked ChatGPT (lol)… You’ve written about it a bit, and there’s clearly an option that your gut is telling you to go towards.
On the counter, you can make a strong choice after barely thinking about it, and then realize that you tripled down on a horribly bad decision. I like to think of all of the Vegas shotgun marriages that have to be nullified every year as an example of why making a strong choice isn’t always the optimal move hahaha
Once you’re at that point, just commit. 1000% make your choice, don’t hedge too much. Or as many a startup / growth executive has said, “Burn the boats” (borrowed from Cortez’s expansion into the Americas, where when his army landed, he had the boats burned as if to tell the team: there is no going back now. This is our strategy).
When applied to business, this is also — at the right time — sage wisdom. I’ve written many times about strategy being equal to choices (credit to Steve Goldbach, CSO of Deloitte)… What does this matter? When a company has a choice, say to enter a new market, and they hedge too much, “Ehh, we’ll put one person there… see what happens…” the strategy just might not work.
Oftentimes, strategies need full backing (investment of time, people, talents + the right timing + all the other factors needed for a successful market campaign)… without full backing, you might not actually know if it works or not. I’m not saying that hedging is a bad thing — it is a perfectly acceptable thing to do while you are capturing data and perspectives…until a point. There comes a time when you need to double-down, make strong choices, and go get the hell after it.
Your life is surrounded by examples of what has happened after a team has committed — whether it’s a technology product that broke through or the very country within which you are reading this letter. At some point, someone (or someones) made a strong choice and they committed more than their competition was willing to.
In closing…
I think what Brittny might’ve been saying underneath the simple + powerful “Make Strong Choices” advice was really to not half-ass something once you’ve chosen to do it. Lean into your choice. Own it. Be amped up about it, and then let that set the tone for how you’ll actually execute on your choice: with commitment and passion.
I’ve found life to be more enjoyable in every way since I internalized this advice. It’s made me embrace commitment in many ways, including (somewhat comically): what to order for dinner.
Whenever I’m sitting there at some new-ish, trendy restaurant and my friend is like, “I’ve heard the cod is just to die for”, but I really want the skirt steak… I really freaking lean into getting the skirt steak. I don’t have regrets about not ordering the cod. Comparison be damned, I wanted the skirt steak, my analysis told me that was the right thing for me, and I’m going to order it with some gusto.
And when I order that damned skirt steak, I will look at the waiter in their eyes, taking an extra 1.2 seconds while I nod my head in self-affirmation, to say: I’ll have The skirt steak, and damn am I pumped about it. (If you think I wouldn’t actually do this, then you’ve never been to dinner with me. I 100% do this on a regular basis).
Obviously the steak ordering thing is a bit ribeye-in-cheek, but the ability to make a choice and not look back is, I think, one of the great secrets to living a better, more full (eh! pun intended) life.
Thanks for reading. I’ll be back later this week with another letter :)
MD