I have regrets about a lot of the breakups I've been through.

It's not that I regret breaking up, I just regret not breaking up sooner. Sometimes the decision is clear before we're willing to pull the trigger.

The hardest part of making difficult decisions is committing in a way where you don't second guess yourself. And that takes two things:

You need to pull the trigger on your decision; and
You need to be willing to be wrong.

Colin Powell (former secretary of state) has a 40/70 rule: Never make a decision with less than 40% of the information available, and don't gather more than 70% of the information available.

Anything less than 40% and you're just guessing, anything more than 70% and you're delaying. There's a certain magic to commitment and action, and if you wait too long you're going to miss it.

A friend has been thinking of leaving his job.

For a while.

Every year, he thinks, maybe it'll be different this year. Maybe I'll be able to make it different. Well, at some point he has more than 70% of the information. Hell, he's probably had more than enough information for a while now. Now he's just putting it off under the guise of getting more "sure".

Same thing with my breakups. I knew I needed to pull the trigger before I did. I just wanted to be 100.00% percent sure, so I waited to gather more information.

And yet in life, there's a cost to each extra percentage point of "being sure".

And sometimes 95% sure, 85% sure, or even 70% sure is better than 100% sure.

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The 40/70 Rule - how to make decisions 🤔