Chad Silverstein argues that leaders must get comfortable with discomfort and make decisions quickly rather than delay them. He recommends writing pros and cons on paper to slow down your thinking and avoid catastrophizing. Making a choice, even an imperfect one, creates opportunities for learning and growth.
Chapters
I find myself in pain a lot, personally and professionally. Life is hard, and you have to learn how to embrace it. Embracing situations where you have to make a decision, and depending on the choices that you have, one's worse than the next. You have to get comfortable being uncomfortable and embracing the fact that you've got to make tough decisions. And if you're in a position to make a tough decision, the longer you delay that, the more stress and the more anxiety it's going to cause. Building the skill to make a choice, make a decision, that's an important skill for leaders to have. There's no one way to do it, and it's not easy, but if you slow down and stop catastrophizing and take out a pen and paper and make two columns and put out all your pros on one side and put out all your cons on the other, and you study what you're seeing, something should become glaringly obvious in what you should do. And sometimes it takes just a few minutes to be able to do an exercise that simple, so that compare the good and the bad and to see which one you can live with, even though they both might be bad, and embrace the fact that one, you're in a position to make that decision, and two, you'll probably learn something from it, and it's probably for your benefit whether you can see it or not. And one day you'll probably be able to look back at and see it, but right now maybe you can't. And so you have a choice., and your choice is whether or not you should embrace it or complain about it. And I gotta tell you, I can't
