Making a Choice, Any Choice

When I was in the process of selling my business, I’ve heard and read about many other business owners who went through a very rough time after they sold it. The reason being that so much of their time and energy has been invested into their business that they’ve began to tie their own identity to it. So, when it was no longer their company to run, they were at a loss as to what to do next.

I thought that this was a pretty realistic thing that can happen, but figured that it would be different for me. I was young, was already pretty burned out from the business, and was looking forward to moving on to something new. The transition would work out just fine, I thought.

To some degree, it has. Right after the company was sold, I was able to make arrangements to do something that I’ve always wanted – go volunteer and live in the developing countries. So, within a matter of a few months, I jumped into that and decided that I’ll put off all of the planning about the future for when I come back.

Then, just what I hoped wouldn’t happen, actually happened. When I returned from my 7 month trip abroad, it was pretty quickly that I realized that I had no idea what to do next.

I didn’t want to jump into the industry that I’ve spent 6 years working in because I wanted to see and learn what else was out there. But to start anywhere else, you needed some industry specific knowledge and I still had this “sense of entitlement” that made it very difficult to be willing to start from scratch.

I jumped between ideas on starting a new business, buying an existing one, starting a job – just doing something that I could start building my new “identity” around. When I’d meet somebody that would ask me what I do for a living, I’d laugh it off and say “that my job is to look for the meaning of life”, but deep down, it was really frustrating me that I didn’t have an answer for this.

The bigger problem with all of this was that as days, weeks and months were rolling by, it felt like it was becoming even more difficult to get out of this sinkhole. After a while, the confidence that I’ve had when I built all of my previous businesses was starting to disappear. Instead, it was becoming replaced by a little voice that would come up every time I would explore a new idea: “Can you really do pull it off? Are you sure it’s not too much risk?”.

The fear to start something and fail at it was affecting all of my decisions. It felt that if nothing else, over the years, all of the companies I started were relatively successful and I can ruin this trend with a wrong choice. As a result, I ended up making no choices at all for some time.

It took some time to realize what was really happening and the consequences of what would happen if this were to continue. “Paralysis by analysis” – a situation where you begin to analyze each opportunity in a million ways and then ultimately find excuses not to do it – is the ultimate barrier to success.

The reality is that it’s often better to make a choice based on limited information and your intuition, then no choice at all. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t analyze and understand the opportunities you have at hand. However, you’ll often find that when you make a decision to pursue something, you start to see new opportunities that you haven’t anticipated and that things tend to work out better than you expected.

The biggest risk you have is not failing, but rather losing time and opportunities due to indecisiveness.