The toughest decisions to make are when we don’t have all of the information. The COVID crisis we face today is a classic example. Every decision, even policy choices, from our most revered experts need to be made on the fly. Decisions will have to be made in the knowledge that by tomorrow or next week, we’ll learn something new.
This is a great allegory for life.
What we should never do is to judge ourselves, or those trying to help us, for making a mistake on something we could not have possibly known yesterday. The world without a pandemic is filled with ambiguity. What we have now is a magnifier.
What we mustn’t do is wait. We must use what little knowledge we do have and move forward. We can’t wait until we know it all, because in all probability, we never will. New information will always present itself after we needed it. If we are facing a career crisis or business challenges right now, we must still act. Work with what we know and navigate changes, as new information comes to hand.
It’s like walking in a fog.
On a foggy night where you can only see 50 feet in front, it’s only after we walk that 50 feet, that the next 50 feet of the journey is revealed. If we need to change direction, we can. But we’ll be further ahead than if we had waited, and we’ll be able to see and know more. Wanting too much knowledge creates inertia and leaves us behind the courageous few who actually did something.
Yes, it’s scary, but sometimes we have to forge ahead through a fog, regardless.
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Keep thinking,
Steve.