The 70% Rule for Faster Decisions

Dana Whitfield

I am standing in the back room of my shop, and I am staring literally staring at three different samples of kraft paper bags. One is a slightly warmer brown, one has a tiny bit of texture, and the third is... well, it is just a paper bag. And I have been standing here for twenty minutes, completely frozen, trying to decide which one to order for the holiday rush. It is ridiculous, right? But we do this all the time. We get stuck in this agonizing freeze, waiting for some magic wave of perfect clarity that is never, ever going to show up.

Dana Whitfield

We tell ourselves we are just being thorough. We are being responsible. But there is a real, hidden tax on that slowness. I remember reading about Jeff Bezos, you know, back in his Amazon shareholder letters, and he talked about this exact trap. He wrote that most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had. Because if you wait for 90 percent, you are being slow. And as he put it, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure. That really hit home for me as a small business owner. Being slow is expensive.

Dana Whitfield

But why is it so hard to just make the call? Well, a lot of it comes down to how we categorize decisions. Economists and tech folks talk about Type 1 and Type 2 decisions, or what I like to call one way doors and two way doors. A one way door is irreversible. If you walk through it, you are stuck there. Think about signing a ten year commercial lease, or, um, selling a majority stake in your company. You want to take your time on those. But a two way door? You walk through, you look around, and if you do not like it, you can just walk right back. Testing a new product line, running a small ad, buying packaging... those are all two way doors. But our anxious brains? Oh, we treat every single tiny daily decision like it is a one way vault we are locking ourselves into forever.

Dana Whitfield

I learned this the hard way when I first opened my shop. I spent, oh, easily three weeks agonizing over the custom tissue paper we use to wrap our items. I was sketching, I was measuring, I was obsessing over logo placement down to the millimeter. I felt like if I made a mistake, it would be a permanent monument to my failure. And then, about six months later, I realized... wait, we are almost out of tissue paper, and I actually want to change the color anyway. It was a two way door the whole time. I could have just ordered the first draft, learned from it, and changed it on the very next order instead of wasting weeks of energy.

Dana Whitfield

So, how do we break out of this? We start using what I call the 70 percent action pass. It is a commitment to making the final call the absolute moment you have about 70 percent of the information you wish you had. You intentionally leave that remaining 30 percent of space wide open. But you do not leave it open to worry. You leave it open for active testing, for learning, and for course correcting as you go. You are shifting from passive, painful waiting to active, real time learning.

Dana Whitfield

Now, if you are a perfectionist like me, your gut reaction is probably, but Dana, isn't that just being sloppy? Isnt that just rushing? But it is not. It is about momentum. True clarity does not come from thinking about taking action. It only comes from the action itself. You learn more from one week of your product being on a shelf than you do from three months of staring at a spreadsheet wondering if people will buy it.

Dana Whitfield

So here is my challenge for you today. Let us do a quick, five minute two way door audit. Think about one decision you have been putting off this week. Maybe it is sending that cold outreach email, or picking a scheduling software, or testing a new service. Ask yourself: is this a one way door or a two way door? Chances are, ninety five percent of the choices you are facing are two way doors. If you can walk back through it, give yourself that 70 percent action pass. Give yourself five minutes, take the very first tiny step, and just walk through the door.

Dana Whitfield

What low stakes choice are you keeping locked behind an imaginary one way door in your mind today? Let it go, make the call, and see what happens. Alright, that is it for me today. Go make some decisions, and I will talk to you soon.