Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram, once told a story about things holding up the development of instagram. One thing was decisions. They took too long to be made.
The solution came from a book called The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt. In the book, a man is in charge of increasing profits for his manufacturing company. He realizes that in order to do this, you must focus most intensely on the slowest part of the business, and then work backwards from there.
To Systrom, reading this was an epiphany. In many companies, and especially fledgling startups, making decisions is often the biggest bottleneck faced. So Systrom decided they would have a meeting of decisions.
They would take all of the decisions that needed to be made, things that were being held up by management, and answer them all on one day in one meeting.
Would this change the company? Yes. But then again, so would not doing anything. And to move forward, they needed to make decisions.
The speed of your decisions dictates how you can move forward.
Hum and Haw, and your life won’t move forward at all. Over the course of a day, you’ll be the same. But over a long time period, you’ll likely atrophy.
Ed Mylett once said that “A decisions means you immediately take action.” If you decide on something and you don’t take action, you didn’t really make a decision.
Send the text. Make the call. Send the email. Buy the plane ticket. Make the risky post. Create a content calendar.
Begin an info exchange with another person (or system). You might get a response. But you’ll never know if you don’t make the decision and act.
Making the decision to do something tomorrow is actually procrastinating. You might talk yourself out of it.
But the higher your decision velocity, the higher your ability to grow, to accelerate your life towards your goals, and to build your business.
