The velocity of your decision can have a tremendous impact on your life and career. It can directly impact your ability to win cool opportunities, how quickly (and how much) momentum you build, and how that impacts your long-term trajectory thanks to the power of compound interest.

One useful way to think about decision-making velocity is as a continuum – one one end, you've got an extreme action-bias with very rapid decision making and on the other end, you've got a more methodical, calculating and slower decision-making process. 

At different stages in your career, and as the stakes change, one default velocity may make more sense than the other. However, early on in your career, when you lack experience, skill, and a strong professional reputation, you can often overcome a mountain of inertia by being quick to say yes to the stuff that excites you. Rather than deliberating too long.

Renowned entrepreneur Derek Sivers once said, "No yes. Either HELL YEAH or no!" That's great advice in the long-run. But in the early innings of your career, a better way to think about it might be "Yes to anything that's not a HELL NO!" And as you gain more experience + clarity about your career,  that shifts to "No to anything that's not a HELL YES!"

The reason this order of operation makes sense is that when you're just starting out, you lack clarity, experience, and credibility. Developing those in tandem gives you more leverage over your career. Your increased skills and experience open up for opportunities. Not to mention, you develop a higher resolution vision for your life and career.  Which is as much about identifying what you want to do as it is about what you don't want to do.

That's why decision-making velocity can make such a huge difference early in your career. The rate at which you conduct experiments greatly impacts your own growth and trajectory. The more decisions you make, the more experience you gain. If you can accelerate that timeline by getting 10-fold more at-bats early in your career, you can set your self up for rapid growth. Which means by your 30s, the momentum you've built could put you in a much stronger position, which much greater leverage and agency over your life.

Don't give yourself paralysis through analysis. Learn how to leverage decision-making velocity to your advantage.

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Praxis is a life and career development program for young adults who want to thrive in the real world. It's your opportunity to shape your future alongside growth-minded peers and dedicated mentors.

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