Don't Fear Decisions
Dean Acheson was present, he said with a twinkle, at the creation. Or rather the re-creation, when a new world order was built from the wreckage of World War II. He was undersecretary of state under George Marshall, then the secretary of state for Harry Truman. In his retirement, he advised John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
There he had a ringside seat to some of the most critical and tense moments in American history. The Marshall Plan. The Berlin Airlift. The Cuban Missile Crisis. The war in Vietnam. The kind of high-pressure situations where the weak wilt and the strong shine, where all that separates the world from chaos and destruction is the courage of good leadership. Where cowardice is not just potentially embarrassing but threatens the lives of millions.
"At the top," Acheson would observe, "there are no easy choices. All are between evils, the consequences of which are hard to judge."
But this is what scares us. Making the wrong decision. Screwing things up. The potential unintended consequences.
What about this?
What about that?
If I get it wrong? If people disagree? If something else happens?
Should you stay?
Go?
Should you say something? Should you try it this way or that way?
But what if it doesn't work?
So many choices. Few of them easy. None of them clear. Scary choices, torturing you, as Shakespeare said, "like a phantasma, or a hideous dream."
We tell ourselves we're thinking, that we're weighing our options, that we're making progress.
In truth, we are paralyzed with fear. Overwhelmed by options. By second guesses. By that hatred of making mistakes. So what we're really doing is making ourselves miserable.
We tell ourselves it's about options . . . really it's paralysis by analysis.
All the while, somebody or someone else is making progress.
There is a story about a Spartan king who was marching across Greece. As he entered each new country, he sent envoys to ask whether he should be prepared to treat them as friends or enemies.
Most of the nations decided quickly, and most of them chose friendship. But one king wanted to think about his options, because he was afraid of committing. So he thought and he thought and he thought . . . until it was chosen for him.
"Let him consider it, then," the frustrated Spartan general said as he fixed his jaw, "while we just march on."
As the song goes, even if you choose not to decide—even if you put things off—you still have made a choice. You are voting for the status quo. You are voting to let them decide. You are voting to give up your own agency.
"What cowardice fears most of all," Søren Kierkegaard said, "is the making of a resolution, for a resolution instantly dissipates the mist."
What you fear is consequences. So you keep deliberating, hoping you can put them off.
Can't lose if you don't choose? Of course you can. You lose the moment. You lose the momentum. You lose your ability to look yourself in the mirror.
You Can't Put Your Safety First
As Julius Caesar sought to overthrow the Roman Republic, because its institutions were getting in his way, Cicero, his longtime rival, seemed to think chiefly of himself. In life and war, Cicero would later say, "one should choose the stronger side and reckon the safe course the better."
Instead of fighting to preserve the nation that he had long served, he just waited to see how things sorted themselves out. When Caesar won, Cicero was there to praise him, even censoring his eulogy for his fallen friends so as not to offend the new dictator. When Caesar was assassinated and Rome was plunged once again into civil war, Cicero put his finger to the wind rather than do what was right.
You might think that this at least had the effect of keeping Cicero alive, but that's the irony. He would soon be killed by Mark Antony anyway. And even if he had survived? His career would have been over anyway because he'd lost all credibility. He died pathetically, losing not only his life but multiple chances to have been a hero.
Sure, it's possible to stand back and let things get sorted out. We can wait to pick a side or a winner. Maybe it'll pay off. Maybe history will leave us blameless.
Maybe.
But deep down, you will know. The fear leaves a stain.
"Never yet," Theodore Roosevelt reminds us, "was worthy adventure worthily carried through by the man who put his personal safety first."
There are things worse than dying. Living with what we had to do to keep living, for one. Regretting that lost opportunity to have been a hero. The hellish existence of a world run by cowards.
Called before a white judge to answer for a controversial sermon, the pastor and civil rights pioneer Vernon Johns could have apologized. He could have folded. He could have protected himself and promised never to criticize segregation or racism. This was the safe thing to do . . . and by the Ciceronian logic, probably the right decision. Instead, he looked the judge in the eye and said, "Everywhere I go in the South the negro is forced to choose between his hide and his soul. Mostly, he chooses his hide. I'm going to tell him that his hide is not worth it."
Fear speaks the powerful logic of self-interest. It is also an inveterate liar.
This self-preservation it promises, the comfort it claims it will protect. Is it even real? How safe are you, really?
We are fragile creatures. Nothing can change that. You're a fool if you think staying on the good side of bad people is a safe bet. The future you seem to be willing to defer anything to ensure? Nothing can guarantee it. This moment, the present you're neglecting—whether it's an opportunity to do something risky and fun, or the call to do something harrowing but right—is all you have.
We like to think we can have an extraordinary life by making ordinary decisions, but it's not true. It's actually all the ordinary decisions—the safe ones, recommended by every expert, criticized by no one—that make us incredibly vulnerable in times of chaos and crisis.
It's worth remembering that most people die in bed. Getting up and getting active is much safer!
It is risky to try to make the future in business, the strategist Peter Drucker has written, but it's riskier still not to even try. Because eventually it will happen—someone will try, and then you'll be on the wrong side of the outcome, or at the very least behind the curve. And that's when you'll lose the initiative.
Life is risky. As the poet Dylan Thomas said, each day is "always touch-and-go." No amount of corporate ass-covering will ever change that. No amount of hiding will actually protect you from scary things. We are already fugitives from the law of averages, we are already marked for death from birth. When you realize this, you can stop being so precious, so concerned about every danger and every possible thing that can go wrong.
Who cares? It's just a drop in the bucket, another point on the risk assessment that is already off the charts as a mortal being.
All certainty is uncertain. You're not safe. You never will be. No one is. In putting safety above everything, we actually put ourselves in danger. Of being forgotten. Of never coming close. Of being complicit.
How will you handle the danger?
"What will happen to me?" No one can tell you that. But with courage, you can say yourself, "I'm not sure, but I will get through it with my soul intact. I will make the best of it. I will not be afraid."
Fear Is Showing You Something
Theodore Roosevelt hesitated before he invited Booker T. Washington to the White House for dinner in 1901. It was the first time in American history that a black man had ever dined as a sitting president's guest.
He hesitated because he was scared. Scared what his southern relatives might think, for fear of what the newspapers would say, fear that racist voters would abandon him, that he would lose support in the South, that it could cost him the election. A sitting president—the man who led the Rough Riders on a suicidal charge, who hunted bears, who had conquered a crippling childhood illness, who had beaten depression and grief and a million other obstacles—was scared of what people might think.
It was a scary situation. As the front-page headline of the New York Times would read the next day: "Washington People, as a Rule, Condemn President's Violation of Precedent—Maryland Campaign Affected."
Condemned as a rule!
Yet in the end, the fear was precisely why Roosevelt decided to go through with it.
"The very fact that I felt a moment's qualm on inviting him because of his color made me ashamed of myself," Roosevelt said in a letter to a civil rights adviser, "and made me hasten to send the invitation. As things turned out, I am very glad that I asked him, for the clamor aroused by the act makes me feel as if the act was necessary."
No rule is perfect, but this one works: Our fears point us, like a self-indicting arrow, in the direction of the right thing to do. One part of us knows what we ought to do, but the other part reminds us of the inevitable consequences. Fear alerts us to danger, but also to opportunity. If it wasn't scary, everyone would do it. If it was easy, there wouldn't be any growth in it. That tinge of self-preservation is the pinging of the metal detector going off. We may have found something.
Will we ignore it? Or will we dig?
Fear votes for hesitation, it always has a reason for not doing and so it rarely does anything. If we don't find ourselves experiencing this hesitation every so often, we should know that we are not pushing ourselves enough.
Imagine, too, though, the hesitation of Booker T. Washington. He was risking his life to accept Roosevelt's invitation. He was risking the precarious support of his white southern donors. He was kicking a violent hornet's nest. We'll have to kill a thousand niggers, the senator Benjamin Tillman said in response, to teach them their place again.
And yet Washington went. Undaunted. Unintimidated. Roosevelt's niece, Eleanor, later talked about doing the thing you cannot do. It is almost always the thing you should do. When something tells you that you're not allowed. When someone tells you that you'll regret your decision. When the pit in your stomach makes you hesitate.
But what will our customers think? But what if our competitors use this against us? What if it doesn't work? Will people be mad at me?
Damn them all.
Decide to testify. Decide to go all in on the new venture. Take the creative risk. Decide to answer the reporter's email. Decide to say what you're hesitant to say.
They say not to take counsel of your fears, but perhaps that's exactly what we should do.
We should listen closely and then do the opposite.
The Scariest Thing To Be Is Yourself
Frank Serpico was the odd man out in the NYPD in the 1960s. He was Italian when most of the cops were Irish. He grew his hair long. He liked opera and ballet. He lived in the Village, while most of his coworkers resided in quiet suburbs. He had a big white sheepdog and wore vests and leather and all sorts of other strange clothes.
And that was when he wasn't in costume.