decisions
The cost of keeping score
What you measure is what you optimize, so be careful you are measuring the thing you actually want.
For a long time I kept score of the wrong number. I tracked how much I read, how many options I compared, how thorough my notes were. It felt like diligence. It was mostly delay.
The number that misled me
When I finally added it up, I was spending more of each decision on the scorekeeping than on the choice itself.1 The spreadsheet was not helping me decide; it was helping me avoid deciding.
What changed
Certainty is a tax you pay to feel safe, and it is rarely worth the price.
I started measuring one thing instead: how fast I could find out I was wrong. A weekend test beat a month of research almost every time.
Three things I track now:
- how reversible the choice is
- how fast the feedback comes
- whether I would be fine if it failed
The five-minute version
Stop grading your own homework.
Take the worksheet
PDF Decisions worksheet 2 KB
Or, for the ones who like paper, the same thing in my handwriting:
| approach | feels like | what it costs |
|---|---|---|
| chase certainty | safe | slow, and still uncertain |
| cheap reversible test | a little scary | fast, and honest |
What I know now is that the scoreboard was never the game. The game was making good calls and recovering fast from bad ones. Keep score of that.
Wu · Da Nang · May 2026
Scaffold sample exercising the content components end to end. Replace with a real essay.
Footnotes
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A made-up figure for this sample, but the pattern was real. ↩