Speed of making decisions #shorts

The speed of making decisions matters more than getting every decision right. If you are waiting to feel certain before you move, you are quietly losing to people who decide faster, accept the misses, and keep going.

Direct Answer: The speed of making decisions is the rate at which you choose, act, accept the outcome, forgive yourself for the bad calls, and move to the next decision. A 60/40 or 70/30 hit rate is enough to win, because volume of decisions, not perfection, compounds into results.

What 'speed of making decisions' actually means

I do not define decision speed as recklessness. I define it as the gap between recognising a mistake and being emotionally ready to make the next call. The shorter that gap, the faster I recover. The longer I sit inside a bad decision, replaying it, the more decisions I miss while I am stuck there.

If I make a bad call at 9am and I am still mentally chewing on it at 4pm, I have just burned seven hours of decision-making capacity. The mistake cost me one decision. The slow recovery cost me dozens.

Why perfection is the wrong target

You are never going to be perfect. All the decisions you will make are never going to be correct. A lot of them will be wrong. A lot of them will be bad. Pretending otherwise is what creates the freeze.

As a Chartered Accountant who has trained more than 79,000 students across 74+ courses, I have watched smart people delay launches, hires, pricing changes, and content decisions for months waiting for the "right" answer. The right answer almost never arrives in the form they were hoping for. The market gives feedback only after you decide.

The 60/40 rule: a working hit-rate target

Here is the maths I run on myself. If I make 50 decisions in a day and 20 of them go wrong, but 30 go right, I am the winner. I am successful. You do not have to look at 100 successful out of 100. 60/40 or 70/30 is good enough.

• 50 decisions per day — the volume that creates real movement
• 30 right, 20 wrong — a 60% hit rate is a winning portfolio
• 70/30 is excellent — anything above this is rare and not the target
• 100/0 is a fantasy — chasing it is what kills momentum

The framing matters. A 60% hit rate sounds mediocre when you measure decision by decision. It sounds extraordinary when you measure it across 50 decisions per day, every day, for a year.

How I forgive myself fast and move on

The single skill I have built deliberately is the forgive-and-move-on reflex. When I catch myself in a bad decision, I do three things in order:

• Name it out loud: "That was a bad call." No softening, no excuses. Naming it ends the loop.
• Extract one lesson, max: Not five. One. More than one and I am ruminating, not learning.
• Make the next decision inside the same hour: Momentum beats reflection. The next decision resets the state.

This sounds simple. It is not easy. Most operators I coach in Dubai spend two days mourning a wrong call. Two days is 100 missed decisions at my pace. That is the actual cost.

Why volume of decisions is the real edge

The people who win in business are not the ones with the highest individual hit rate. They are the ones who run the most decisions through the system. If you are making enough number of decisions every single day, making enough number of mistakes, and also making a lot of right decisions, the right ones compound and the wrong ones get absorbed.

Think of it like a real-estate portfolio. One property going bad does not break the portfolio if you own thirty. One decision going wrong does not break your week if you made fifty. Concentration kills. Volume protects.

How to install this in your week

If you want to raise the speed of making decisions inside your business, here is the install:

• Count your decisions for one day. Most operators will find they make 8-15, not 50. That gap is the opportunity.
• Set a 24-hour mourning cap on any bad call. Past 24 hours, the lesson is extracted or it is dropped. No more loops.
• Stop pre-mortems on small-stakes decisions. Reserve deep analysis for irreversible calls. Everything else gets the gut call.
• Track hit rate weekly, not daily. One bad day looks catastrophic. One bad week inside a winning month is noise.

What this looks like in real-estate and AI consulting

I run AI consulting work out of Dubai and watch real-estate operators make the same freeze pattern. A broker sits on a listing strategy for three weeks because they are not sure which platform to push it on. In those three weeks, the operator who decides on day one, fails on platform A, learns, and shifts to platform B has already closed the deal. The hit rate was lower. The speed was higher. The outcome was better.

Decision speed is not a personality trait. It is a built skill, and the cost of not building it is invisible — because the missed decisions never show up on a P&L. They just show up as a slower business than your competitor's.

Summary: The speed of making decisions, not the perfection of each decision, is what separates operators who compound from operators who stall. Your one specific step today: count how many real decisions you made yesterday, and if the number is under 20, raise it tomorrow by lowering the bar on every reversible call.