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Earlier this week I was talking with a founder who felt stuck.
Not stuck from laziness.
Not stuck from lack of intelligence.
Stuck from “thinking”.
More analysis.
More modeling.
More scenario planning.
More “what if we just wait one more week so everything is optimal?”
And it reminded me of something I’ve come to believe deeply:
The universe has a tax on deliberation.
In a costless, abstract world, more thinking always improves decisions.
In practice, however, thinking is not free.
Every extra minute spent optimizing carries opportunity cost. Delay has a cost. Energy has a cost. Focus has a cost.
And once you account for those costs, the net value of continued deliberation peaks quickly… and then collapses.
There is a moment (often sooner than you think) when the correct move is:
Prioritize action (even imperfect action)
The Four Levers That Actually Matter
In decision-making, most people obsess over just one variable: quality.
But in live environments — startups, careers, health, investing — four levers determine outcomes:
Quality of decisions
Speed of decision-making
Accuracy of feedback
Speed of iteration
Miss one, and the system degrades.
Optimize only one, and you lose…
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1) Quality of Decisions
Yes, quality matters.
A well-informed decision beats a reckless one.
Clear thinking beats impulsive guessing.
But quality improves with diminishing returns.
The first 60–80% of decision quality usually comes quickly:
Clarify the objective.
Identify the main constraint.
Choose between a few viable options.
The final 20%?
That’s where over-analysis lives.
And that final 20% is expensive.
2) Speed of Decision-Making
Speed is not recklessness. Speed is recognizing when additional thinking produces minimal gain.
In a live environment:
Markets move.
Competitors ship.
Customers churn.
Energy declines.
Context shifts.
A good decision today often beats a slightly better decision next month.
Because next month, the environment will be different.
3) Accuracy of Feedback
A decision is only as good as the feedback loop it triggers.
You don’t get clarity from thinking.
You get clarity from contact with reality.
Launching gives feedback.
Shipping gives feedback.
Publishing gives feedback.
Making the sales call gives feedback.
Waiting does not.
If you delay action, you delay signal.
And without signal, you’re optimizing in the dark.
4) Speed of Iteration
Iteration compounds.
If you:
Decide fast
Act fast
Receive feedback fast
Adjust fast
You lap someone who is still perfecting version one.
Iteration speed is often more predictive of long-term success than initial intelligence.
The founder who ships five imperfect versions learns more than the founder who ships one polished masterpiece.
We rarely calculate the cost of delay explicitly.
But it exists (anyone who has been a chronic overthinker can relate here)
Thinking (especially worry or over-analyzing) should be treated as a direct energy loss.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
It consumes cognitive bandwidth.
It drains emotional stability.
It fragments focus.
It creates anxiety without output.
Rumination feels productive because it is mentally active. But it produces no external change.
In that sense, it is pure burn.
If the decision is to do nothing, then do nothing.
Including not ruminating.
If the decision is to take X action, then proceed.
Don’t keep mentally revisiting it.
Every reopened loop re-taxes your energy.
Rationality Collapses Faster Than You Think
In theory, more information always improves decisions.
In practice, every second of additional analysis delays execution.
Imagine plotting two curves:
One curve shows how decision quality improves with more thinking.
The other shows the cost of delay increasing over time.
The “net value” of thinking rises… then peaks… then declines.
There is a crossover point.
Beyond that point, continued deliberation is irrational.
And in fast-moving environments, that peak arrives quickly.
Which is why real-world rationality often collapses into:
“Just do things.”
Not because thinking is bad.
But because thinking is not free.
Keep building,
Brett Erik
(for my fellow nerds, check out this article and diagram for more in-depth analysis of this concept: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26185246/)
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