I am often asked, what is analysis paralysis? How do I cure it?
In analysis paralysis, there’s two types of people in the world. There’s guys over here like me who make decisions really fast and we have a risk of being reckless.
Then there’s guys over here who are too cautious and they have the risk of analysis paralysis.
Now if you are one who makes decisions fast, to protect yourself, you’ve always got to have an escape clause to get out of your decision if you make a decision too fast.
If you are the type of person who make decisions too slow and need to know everything, you have the risk of the disease analysis paralysis.
Analysis paralysis is where we need to know every little thing about every single thing and every little detail. People who are like this are typically smart people.
You’ve got your engineers, your doctors, your lawyers, any of your fact driven people, maybe teachers. Maybe those types of people get analysis paralysis and that’s where we need to know too many things about our business or too many things before making a decision.
And what happens is, when we get into analysis paralysis, no decisions are ever made. Now the sad thing is in business, we’ve got to make a lot of decisions and we’ve got to make them quick.
If we’re in the analysis paralysis mode, we can never make a decision. You better off to make a wrong decision now and get it corrected than it is to make no decision at all.
So my tip to people who have analysis paralysis or run the risk of analysis paralysis, is you need to find out 70% of the facts that you need to know and make a decision.
If you know 70% of the things that you need to know about the decision, then make the decision. You don’t need to know 100%, you don’t need to know 110%, just get to 70% and pull the trigger.
There’s a very, very old piece of wisdom and the old piece of wisdom says successful people make decisions quick and make slow adjustments and unsuccessful people make decisions slow and make fast adjustments.
That means that you want to be the guy who makes a quick decision and adjusts it slowly. That’s what successful people do.
Respect The Grind,
Stefan Aarnio
