How to take Right decision |Take faster decisions| career talks |Sawan Kumar

If you want to make faster decisions without second-guessing yourself for weeks, you need a repeatable framework — not more information. After coaching 79,000+ students through career pivots, business launches, and real estate moves, I've seen the same pattern: smart people don't lack data, they lack a decision system.

Direct Answer: The fastest way to make the right decision is to classify it first (reversible vs irreversible), set a hard deadline, write down the top three options with one-line trade-offs, and choose the option that protects your downside while keeping the most future doors open. For 80% of decisions, a 70% confidence level is enough — waiting for 95% certainty is what costs you years.

Why Most People Take Too Long to Decide

As a Chartered Accountant who later built a business teaching AI and automation, I've watched two failure modes destroy more careers than any bad decision ever did: paralysis and impulse. Paralysis dresses itself up as "due diligence," but it's usually fear in a suit. Impulse pretends to be courage, but it's often just exhaustion from carrying the question too long.

The cost of indecision is invisible, which is why we underestimate it. While you debate whether to take the new job, your current role compounds frustration, your skills stagnate, and the offer expires. Speed isn't recklessness — speed is the discipline of knowing which decisions deserve weeks and which deserve twenty minutes.

Step 1: Classify the Decision Before You Analyse It

Jeff Bezos calls these Type 1 (one-way doors) and Type 2 (two-way doors) decisions. Before you spend a single hour analysing, ask:

• Is this reversible? If yes, decide in hours, not weeks.
• What's the real cost of being wrong? Quantify it in money, time, and reputation.
• What's the cost of doing nothing? Most people skip this — and it's usually higher than the cost of acting.

Quitting a job you can return to in your network is reversible. Signing a 10-year property lease in Dubai is not. Treat them differently.

Step 2: Use the 10-10-10 Rule

Before any major call — career switch, real estate purchase, business pivot — I run the option through three time horizons: How will I feel about this in 10 minutes? In 10 months? In 10 years?

The 10-minute lens exposes emotional reactions. The 10-month lens reveals practical consequences. The 10-year lens shows you what actually matters. Most decisions that feel urgent at the 10-minute mark become irrelevant by the 10-month mark. And most decisions that feel scary at the 10-minute mark are the ones that pay off most at the 10-year mark.

Step 3: Set a Decision Deadline

Direct Answer: A decision without a deadline is not a decision — it's a fantasy. Give every meaningful choice a fixed expiration date: 24 hours for small calls, 7 days for medium ones, 30 days maximum for life-defining ones. Beyond 30 days, you're not deciding, you're avoiding.

I write the deadline on a sticky note next to my monitor. When the timer hits zero, I commit — even if I'm only 70% sure. The 30% you don't know will only become clear after you act. Information asymmetry is permanent; perfect data never arrives.

Step 4: Apply the Three-Option Rule

The brain freezes when it has too many options and panics when it has only one. Force exactly three options on the table — never two, never five. Two options creates a false binary; five options creates analysis paralysis.

• Option A: The obvious choice (the one you've been considering)
• Option B: The opposite (what would you do if A wasn't available?)
• Option C: A creative hybrid (what if you could do half of A and half of B?)

For a career decision, this might look like: (A) accept the new job, (B) negotiate harder at the current job, (C) take the new job conditionally for 6 months while keeping consulting income. Option C usually didn't exist in your head until you forced yourself to write it down.

Step 5: Run a Pre-Mortem, Not a Post-Mortem

Before committing, imagine it's 12 months from now and the decision failed catastrophically. What went wrong? Write down the top three failure modes. This is the single highest-leverage exercise I teach in my coaching calls — it surfaces blind spots that no spreadsheet ever will.

If the failure modes are recoverable (lost six months, lost some money, learned a lesson), proceed. If a failure mode is fatal (bankruptcy, broken family, unrecoverable reputation), redesign the decision until those failure modes are eliminated or capped.

Step 6: Use AI as a Decision Sparring Partner

I now run every significant decision through ChatGPT or Claude as a structured devil's advocate. The prompt I use: "I'm considering X. Steel-man the strongest case against this decision. List five risks I'm probably underweighting. Then propose two alternatives I haven't considered."

The AI doesn't decide for you — but it surfaces the questions a calm advisor would ask. For real estate decisions, I've added: "Calculate the true cost of ownership over 5 years including opportunity cost of capital at 8%." That single line has changed three of my last property decisions.

Step 7: Commit Loudly, Review Quietly

Once you decide, announce it. Tell three people. Take an irreversible micro-action within 24 hours — sign the offer letter, transfer the deposit, send the resignation email. Public commitment kills the relitigation loop where you re-debate the decision every Sunday night.

Then schedule a calendar review for 90 days out. Not to second-guess — to learn. Was the decision right given what you knew? Did you execute well? What would you change next time? Decision quality and outcome quality are different things; you can make a great decision and get a bad outcome, and vice versa.

The framework above has compressed decisions that used to take me three months into three days, with better outcomes. Pick the one decision you've been avoiding this week and run it through Steps 1-4 in the next 30 minutes — that's your next move.

Keep Learning

If this was useful, these are worth reading next:

• Musk vs Altman . Who wins?
• Why I chose Dubai for my Next Chapter #dubai
• Or go further with the AI Mastery Course — used by 79,000+ students across 150+ countries.

Source: Compiled from Decisive (Chip & Dan Heath, 2013), Jeff Bezos shareholder letters, and internal coaching outcomes (412 students surveyed, Q1 2025).