In his book, This Is Your Life, Not A Dress Rehearsal, Jim Donovan said:
One of the chief characteristics of virtually all highly successful people is that they make decisions quickly, and rarely, if ever, change them.
This might seem like a rigid, perhaps even arrogant attitude - to refuse to change a decision - but there is something else at work here.
One of the keys to success is to be able to make things happen. In order to do this, you have to make a lot of decisions. If you know what you are doing, you will make most of them correctly. Incorrect decisions aren’t so much failures, as they are examples of what doesn’t work.
When you learn to fly an airplane on instruments (when you are in the “soup” and you can’t see outside of the plane), as you monitor your gauges and controls, you are taught to make little corrections when you see the plane drifting off course or out of your assigned altitude. You must make lots of little corrections, and you must make them constantly.
My instrument instructor told me, “Focus on your gauges, trust them, and make little corrections - constantly.” The result is that your plane never gets too far off course, or into an unsafe attitude.
Successful people do the same thing in their businesses. They make lots of decisions. And while it may seem that they rarely change a decision, it’s really more a matter of moving on and making the next decision with new information. Little corrections, but lots of them. Constantly.
Sometimes it feels as if we are managing our businesses in the soup. And just like a pilot on instruments, it’s natural to freeze up at first. When you get this feeling, focus on your gauges - the decisions that have to be made. Then make lots of decisions, and trust them to either lead you to success or the next decision.
Good flying.
