On Decisiveness

Decisiveness saved me from calamity on a mountain.

During a visit to Stanford three years ago, friends and I bused from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe to snowboard for a day. They were seasoned, but I came in at a disadvantage.

I hadn’t snowboarded in a year, and I only had a half-day to re-learn the ropes. My gear was too tight. I was sleep-deprived and dehydrated. What’s worse, the heaviest snow in years for that day was set to fall.

What that means is while I spent that day keeping up with my friends on the harder slopes, falling down over and over, getting more tired and discouraged by the hour, a snowstorm also started swirling around us.

As snowfall accelerated and people cleared, it became dangerously clear we had to make it to safety. We also were in danger of missing the bus back to SF. I didn’t know how I’d make it. I was still high up and falling down more, not less, as time wore on. Each fall took me more time to recover.

My friend Ino came up. He was worried. He couldn’t make it down for me.

“Jeddy,” he said. “Are you gonna be able to do this? We gotta make the bus.”

I labored, “Ino… I really… don’t know.”

He went silent for a moment, thinking hard, and got out, “I’m going to hurry to the bus. I’ll tell them to wait for you. You gotta make it down.”

I nodded. And he flew off.

I tried to go on. I kept getting psyched out and falling. Backwards. Forwards. Wiping out. Eventually, I just sat down. To recover.

Every once in a while, someone flew by. I couldn’t get them to stop. Finally, I got someone’s attention. Tall guy in red gear. I said I needed help. He said he’d get the ski patrol. He flew off.

The next few minutes felt like an eternity… snow was piling up on me and flying into my eyes… i was in a daze… couldn’t see well… lost track of time since red guy left… began giving in… to the thought of death… “Well, so this is how it ends… at least the snow will preserve me for when they find my body.”

Then — the closest thing I’ve had to a divine moment happened.

As I stared blankly into the frosty distance, a voice spoke to me. “Jeddy,” it said, “you will not die here today. You have too much important work to do. You may not know what it is when you make it down, but in order to find out, you must make it down.”

That’s when clarity seized me like a lightning bolt. I said aloud, “Come hell or high water, I’m making it down to that bus. And in order to do that, I’m not going to fall down, not even once. I won’t allow myself to.”

I shot upright. And for the next 10–15 minutes, with utmost conviction and almost zen-like peace, I snowboarded down past all the hills, curves, and obstacles that had given me grief before. There was no possibility in my mind that I would fall down.

And I didn’t fall down. Not even once.

I made it to the bus. Ino had begged and stalled them for 30 minutes. They would have left. When I boarded, the entire bus erupted in applause.

I learned that day that decisiveness is always within you. I also learned much later that mountain climbers training for Everest are taught to put one foot in front of the other above all else when thoughts strike of stopping to rest. It is at that point that they are most at risk of freezing to death.

The lessons I learned from the mountain are valuable for individuals, people, and organizations navigating change. Decisiveness is a human problem.

Luckily, you don’t need to be staring death in its cold face to see the power of decisiveness. Furthermore, I believe that cultivating decisiveness is important now more than ever in pandemic times. I will explain why and how.

Everything is a decision, including indecision. This poses a problem for people who struggle with perfectionism like me.

How much good is captured under the curve created by this decision? What if I could take it back and have some sort of choose-your-own-adventure way of flipping back in time? What if I could wait for more perfect information?

I’ve combated my perfectionist tendencies by understanding delay as an attempted emotional coping mechanism in response to perceived risks, and taking back its power over me by using fear as a compass to keep making decisions. (Also, despite what string theory may say about parallel universes, I don’t think it matters, because we can only manage one string at a time.)

It goes beyond just perfectionism, though. So much goes into decisiveness, from the neurobiology of decision-making and learning, to the psychology of making a decision at the micro or macro level, to modeling how we learn and make sense of the world.

For example, there are many frameworks for making decisions. Legendary US Air Force Colonel John Boyd gave us the OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos decides based on 70% confidence, reversibility, and the regret minimization framework.

I love to live in that space after the decision-making process, between the pregnant pause pre-decision and the moments after the decision.

Everything pre-decision serves the status quo, and of course this feels scary and doesn’t make any sense. Then suddenly, reality bends around the gravity of our decision, and you are creating new life and of course this all makes sense.

“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’ve had to become more decisive since the pandemic.

I’ve made tough choices about my sleep hygiene, sticking to a morning routine, where I live, who I work with, my self-talk, my financial health, and how I show up for others. These choices matter even more given I work in mental health.

My work in mental health at InCommon stems from personal struggles with anxiety, depression, ADHD, and other issues that led to addiction, and ultimately recovery. I’ve worked closely with mental health communities to better understand the intersection of complex issues that make the difference between mental illness and mental wellness. More importantly, I’m focused on translating insights into actions that lead to sustained improvements in quality of life.

I’d boil that down to a technical-sounding concept called data-informed behavior modification, which asks, “Now that you know that, what are you going to do differently that will get you closer to your goal?”

Our product, the InCommon app, helps addiction treatment providers answer that by getting insights on how their patients are doing after they leave rehab.

Knowing “How am I doing?” is a life-or-death issue for people in recovery, and it’s also important for the lay person. Quarantine creates a suspended alternate reality in which time loses definition, traditional structures dissolve, and moral fatigue sets in with each decision made or not made. Crisis may ultimately make us better, but it tends to accelerate pre-existing negative influences first.

Addiction and substance use disorders are skyrocketing. Domestic violence rates have significantly increased. In addition to mass unemployment, a whole generation of renters is facing possible eviction.

Given this problem, I believe it’s even more important to be decisive and to choose behaviors that improve quality of life, not to treat this as an inconsequential time-out.

For people struggling with addiction, it’s natural to feel tempted to numb and self-medicate with drugs of choice or escapist behaviors. But when the high or escape has passed, the original problem is still there. It will still be there until it is acted upon. This is a principle worth applying for anyone.

Now that you know that, what are you going to do differently that will get you closer to your goal?

The pandemic has thrust upon us the greatest collective mental health experience any of us will share. Even the most privileged among us have taken a haircut. It is rare to have a singular point in time to contextualize a common sense of anxiety, depression, anguish, dread, highs and lows.

It is hard to make decisions across time when so much is uncertain and we are unsure of our ability to handle future consequences.

But the beauty of deciding in uncertain times is that the act of killing alternatives counterintuitively gives life to new, hopefully better alternatives.

Deciding, getting feedback, and successfully handling second-order consequences of decisions make up a feedback loop that feeds our sense of autonomy, purpose, and mastery. Knowing that you can handle whatever adversity life throws at you is a vitally important asset for one’s mental health.

By falling in love with the decision-making process, we can reclaim personal power from boredom, fear, and sadness.

The root word ‘-cide’ in the word ‘decide’ comes from a Latin root ‘-caedere’ which means ‘cut’ or ‘kill’.

A decision, then, is a ‘cutting off’ of all possibilities except one, the one upon which you have decided; if you are decisive, you have ‘killed’ all other options.

There is power in d e c i d i n g to do something despite doubt, anxiety, or imperfect information. There is power in saying, “Come hell or high water, this is how it’s going to be.”

It is power that can save your life.

You are exerting control over a sliver of life, which is uncontrollable. You are creating certainty amid uncertainty.

I had a choice on that mountain: Stay put and face certain death, or intentionally and actively decide toward life. Once I made that choice, I opened myself up to power I didn’t know I had before in order to see that choice become reality.

Decisions create more information. Decisions reveal our values and get us closer to what we are, but not necessarily what we want.

Decisiveness can get us from “I can’t” to “I did.”

The point of deciding is not to be perfect or optimal.

The point is to keep deciding.

It may even save your life.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where — ” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“ — so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
— Chapter 6, Pig and Pepper, Alice in Wonderland