Two of my favorite podcasts recently both hit on a similar message I find very valuable.
Jeff Bezos was recently on the Lex Friedman podcast talking about "one-way and two-way door" decisions.
Jeff coined this expression from his leadership decisions at Amazon, often pushing his team to make most of their decisions with more speed, as the vast majority of the decisions were "two-way" door decisions.
The point being that if you choose to make a decision and thus walk through the door, only to find out that it was in fact not the right call, you can easily just walk back through it and try a different door.
Very rarely are we faced with the one-way door in which there is no turning back once the decision is made.
Here is Jeff talking about it on the pod:
This past week I also listened to the Daily Stoic Podcast which had NY Times Best Seller and popular podcaster Tim Ferris on to discuss productivity and lifestyle creation.
The host Ryan Holiday and Tim were discussing Ryan's big idea of opening a bookstore in Austin, Texas and Tim explained his advice to him was to change the way he talked to himself about the decision.
Yes, opening a book store was a large financial risk - (Ryan talks about the cost being around ~$75,000 in upstart costs over a 2-3 year perioid) but it also was initially being discussed as a life-altering decision.
When Ryan was making the decision to open the store or not he called Tim for advice. What Tim encouraged Ryan to do was to change the way he was thinking about this career move.
Rather than thinking that opening this book store would be Ryan's new identity - Tim challenged him to allow himself to look at this experience as an "Experiment" vs. a final, all encompassing decision that he was making.
Additionally, he asked him to think about how much he valued the experience of knowing whether or not a book store would succeed. He broke down that $75,000 cost over that time period.
"Would you pay $25k a year for 3 years to know for sure if running a good bookstore is a good idea?"
The conversation closed with Tim also reminding Ryan that if the decision to open the store turned out to not be the right move - the end result is usually not as bad as what we think in our heads.
How we talk to ourselves matter.
How we frame situations in our head's matter.
How we choose to go about making decisions matter.
I recently made the difficult decision to leave my corporate job to start something for myself.
That decision was difficult, and at times felt larger in my head than reality.
The fact is deciding to leave my job is a 2-way door decision.
Maybe by focusing on this entrepreneurial journey I really unlock more of my full potential and build something incredibly valuable to people.
Or maybe I go through this experience to find that this isn't yet the path for me either, and I return back to a corporate job.
I don't know what the future has in store, but I do know that I value giving myself a chance to find out if it was worth a try.
Maybe you've been on the edge of making a decision as well.
I will leave with you one question -
Is it a one-way or two-way door?
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