Stop Thinking About It & Make The Hard Decision

JOB SEARCH STRATEGY
The Graveyard of Broken Resolutions.

It’s the first of the year, and everyone is energetic.

2024 is going to be the best year yet!

This is the year I go after that startup job I’ve been dreaming of.

This is the year I accelerate my career to Senior Manager, Director, VP, or into the C-Suite.

This is my year!

But hold your horses…

If you’re like 91% of Americans (which the numbers say you likely are), then odds are your New Year’s resolutions will fail.

In fact, the research shows that 23% of you won’t make it until Sunday before breaking your resolution, and 43% of you won’t make it until the end of the month.

So…

How do you avoid that trap and not be a nameless tombstone in the graveyard of broken resolutions?

You must decide.

MY FRIEND’S DECISION
To Not Decide, Is To Decide.

A very successful friend recently reached out to chat about his career.

He wasn’t feeling challenged.

He had lost his passion for the company's mission, and his faith in the leadership around him was decreasing.

The conversation went like this…

B: “I’m just not excited anymore. I used to wake up every day and couldn’t wait to get to work, and now I have to drag myself out of bed. There’s an itch in my head that I need to do what will light that fire again.”

K: “Ok, what would you be excited about?”

B: “I want to jump into a COO role at an early-stage company and leverage my background and passion for scaling marketplaces.”

K: “Sweet, that sounds awesome. So, go look for a job doing that.”

B: "Ehhhh. I don’t know, man. It’s not good timing to make a call right now. I can wait. I can see things out.”

K: “Ok cool. So you’ve made a decision not to follow through then. That’s what you’ve decided.”

It may sound harsh, but it was true.

He had decided not to decide.

Which is a decision.

Remember that if you don’t decide on something, a strategy will present itself whether you like it or not and make the decision for you.

And, because it won’t be in your control, you may not like the decision.

HARD DECISION VS. STRATEGIC CHOICE
What’s The Difference?

People often confuse hard decisions with strategic choices, so it’s important to distinguish between the two.

Hard Decisions

Hard decisions change the trajectory of your life.

It’s the one decision you made consciously or unconsciously that has affected how you have lived your life since.

Blake la Grange, founder of Mastering.com and a mentor, said to me…

It’s the difference between my friend’s wishy-washy answer above and… “I’ve decided I’m not going to stay in this company anymore and instead to go after a COO role. I don’t know how I’ll get there, but I’ve decided to move on and start a new chapter in my life.”

That is a decision.

It’s a declaration to yourself that you were one thing, and now you’re a new thing.

This does not mean you must quit your current job and move on.

But the next day, your mind will be on a new track and will focus on implementing your decision instead of considering all the possible alternative futures.

Internally this should feel like drinking a large glass of cool water on a hot day or like that fire has been ignited inside of you.

You have done the hard part and made the decision.

Now, you can figure out how to make that decided future a reality.

Strategic Choices

So, what is a strategic choice?

A strategic choice is how you will put your hard decision into action.

It sounds like…

“Now that I’ve decided to move on from this job, I can work on the job search strategy and figure out the timeline.”

This may sound straightforward, but more often than not, people skip the hard work of making the initial decision and jump straight into strategic choices.

If you skip the hard decision, you’ll find anxiety and poor outcomes on the other side.

NO SKIPPING
The Pain of Skipping The Decision.

If you skip the hard decision and focus on the strategic choices instead, you’ll become a victim of circumstance and will experience anxiety.

Becoming A Victim of Circumstance

In my seventh year at Uber, my NYC e-bike market was closed.

The future of my path at the company was unclear.

I didn’t see where I would go, so I started talking to people who had left.

This wasn’t the first time I had done this.

Multiple times before, I had consulted early employees who had left the company and gone on their next adventure to learn what it was like and how they made the decision, but I never decided to leave.

After the NYC e-bike’s market closure, I knew I wasn’t fulfilled in the role and needed a new challenge but I decided not to decide and instead see where the cards fell.

That decision was made for me when Uber sold the entire division of the company and laid off all the employees inside.

This is what we call becoming a victim of circumstance.

You wait for the worst thing to happen and let it decide for you because it happened to you.

That is not a position of power.

It’s not a position that creates clarity of thought.

It is a position that often creates desperation, which is not an attractive look in a job search.

Strategy Anxiety

I’ve lived with a (un)healthy dose of anxiety in my life, which I now realize is because I was terrified to make the wrong decision.

Instead of deciding, I would obsessively evaluate the tiny details of every possible strategy and the resulting outcome.

There were infinite possibilities, infinite decisions, and infinite strategies, which led to a tidal wave of information, paralysis, putting off the actual decision that needed to be made, and as a result… anxiety.

This doesn’t work because you can only make decisions based on the strategies you’ve been evaluating when it should be the other way around.

You should decide on a strategy based on your hard decision, not vice versa.

THE BENEFITS
THE POWER OF DECIDING.

In my life, the times I have made a hard decision have opened endless possibilities, allowed me to be creative, and driven results I would never have dreamed of.

In my first job out of college, after being rejected from the management trainee program for the third time in two years, I decided I wanted to do work I was excited about.

I knew the general direction I wanted to go, which made me open to any possibility of getting there.

That made me open to meeting a girl in Las Vegas who would become my wife, quitting my job in Seattle, moving to New York City, and landing a job as an early Uber employee.

If I was trying to figure out strategies to lead me to that outcome without first making the hard decision of the change I wanted to make I would never have experienced such wild results.

Once you separate decision-making and strategy, your odds of success and magnitude of success go up significantly.

If you have made a hard decision, you should feel internal alignment.

(If you don’t, go back and reassess the decision.)

Internal alignment allows you to see all kinds of new options and pathways that you didn’t previously notice.

Opening your eyes to new options and pathways will result in more creativity, engagement with the strategy, and excitement in the “doing” of the necessary work.

You’ll find that you’re a much better judge of whether strategies are useful because they won’t have an emotional tie to your hard decision.

Strategies presented are just a means to an end, and you can judge whether or not you think they’ll be successful in getting you to that end, not whether that end is where you want to be in the first place.

So, if you’re considering making a change this year.

If this year is the year you…

• Change jobs

• Join a new startup

• Pursue a new industry

• Build a deeper network

• Gather experienced mentors

Whatever the dream is.

Stop thinking and decide.

This framework for making decisions has been a game-changer for me.

It allows me to check myself when I’m avoiding decisions and focusing on strategy instead.

It has given me peace and alignment in the hard decisions I make and helped me improve my outcomes following those decisions.

It may feel like the decision you’re considering right now is hard.

But, if it’s the right decision, once you truly decide you’ll ask yourself…

“Why did I wait so long?”

Let’s become career champions together 🏆

Kyle