We take hundreds of decisions every day. Most don't matter.
Every once in a while, one changes everything.

I've made my share of both kinds. Some I agonised over for weeks. Others I made in an instant. The quality didn't always correlate with the time spent. And when nothing worked, listening to my gut turned out to be working quite well so far.

What helped though was building a framework. Not a rigid checklist, more like a set of lenses I rotate through until the picture sharpens.

Here's what I've learned.

Before you decide anything: reframe the question.

Most bad decisions aren't bad answers. They're answers to the wrong question.

Before diving into pros and cons, pause and ask:

What exactly am I deciding? Often the decision you think you're making isn't the actual decision. Peel the layers. Can it be broken into smaller, sequential steps? Can you decide part of it now and defer the rest?

What other options exist that I haven't considered? The most powerful move in decision-making is expanding the option set before narrowing it. Reframe the decisive question itself.

Is this actually irreversible? Jeff Bezos calls this the one-way door vs. two-way door distinction. One-way doors – irreversible, high-consequence – deserve slow, deliberate thinking. Two-way doors – reversible, correctable – deserve speed. Most decisions are two-way doors that we mistakenly treat as one-way doors.

Do I have enough information or am I stalling? Bezos suggests acting at 70% certainty. Waiting for 90% is usually too slow. Course-correcting is cheaper than waiting. Opening one, having a quick look and return can be more powerful than thinking for too long.

Is no decision worse than any decision? Sometimes the cost of indecision exceeds the cost of a wrong decision. Recognise when you're in one of those situations – and act.
A hint for founders: Speed and iterations outperform overthinking most of the times ;)

Five lenses I use to assess the heavy decisions.

Once the question is clear, I rotate through these:

1. Purpose alignment.

Does this bring me closer to what I want to bring into the world?

This sounds abstract until you've done the work. Defining your personal purpose – even roughly – is the single most powerful decision accelerator I know. It turns complex multi-variable problems into something surprisingly binary: does this serve my purpose, or doesn't it?

Not every decision needs to be purpose-driven. But the important ones should pass this filter. Also saying 'No' become so much easier.

2. Risk asymmetry.

What's the best that could happen? What's the worst?

This is where I borrow from Nassim Taleb's concept of the risk of ruin. His core insight: the presence of ruin disqualifies all cost-benefit analysis. If the worst-case scenario is existential – full wipe-out, no coming back – the expected upside is irrelevant. Never play games where you can lose everything.

Taleb's phrasing captures this quite well: "Never cross a river if it is on average four feet deep."

But if the worst case is survivable? Then weigh it honestly against the best case. Most founders overweight the downside and underweight the upside on non-ruinous bets.
Also, when you have the luck to be born in a part of the world that prevents you from starving etc if you fail, the downside is so much more limited than for most people around the globe or in history. This reframes 'too risky'.

3. The regret test.

Jeff Bezos famously used what he calls the Regret Minimisation Framework to decide whether to leave D.E. Shaw and start Amazon. Project yourself to age 80. Look back. Which choice will you regret more – trying and failing, or never trying at all?

I've extended this into a cluster of related questions:

  • Is it worth my lifetime, regardless of money and status? What will I learn? Will I be in my flow? Will I be surrounded by people who make me better?
  • Am I the best person for this or is someone else? What exactly would be my role, my day-to-day tasks? How would I know I am doing well? What would success mean, look like, feel like?
  • Would it happen without me? I borrowed the concept of additionality from climate policy. If this thing will happen anyway, with or without you, your time might be better spent where your contribution is actually additional.
  • Will it spark joy? Sounds simple. Isn't. (Borrowed from my mymuesli co-founder Max.)

4. Counsel – but selective.

Whose perspective would actually shift my thinking?

Not "who should I ask", but whose specific lens on this situation matters. I keep a mental (and written) list of people whose judgment I respect in different domains. When a big decision arises, I don't survey the crowd. I pick 2-3 very different people whose experience maps onto the specific shape of the problem.

5. The whole-body yes.

This one comes from Tim Ferriss, and it's the final filter I apply after the rational work is done.

Run a scan across three systems:

  • Brain: Does the rational analysis check out?
  • Heart: Does it feel emotionally right?
  • Gut: Does my instinct say yes?

All three light up? You have a whole-body yes. Act on it. And don't look back.

If one or two are off, that's worth investigating. The brain might say yes while the gut resists – that's useful data. The heart might be excited while the brain flags risk – also useful.

I've learned to listen especially carefully when brain and gut disagree. The gut has access to pattern recognition that the brain can't articulate. Five years of intensive leadership coaching taught me to take those signals seriously. Thanks to you, Katrin, also for the next one!

One more thing: listen to your inner voices.

This is the layer most founders skip – because it sounds soft and they want to move fast.

Over the years, I've come to identify and name distinct "inner voices" that show up in decision moments. The ambitious one. The cautious one. The one that wants to please. The one that's afraid.

None of them are wrong. But each has a bias. Learning to hear them distinctly – rather than as a muddled noise – helps me understand why a decision feels hard. Often the difficulty isn't in the decision itself. It's in the unresolved tension between two inner voices.

The meta-lesson.

After 25 years, here's what I know: the quality of your decisions improves less from better frameworks and more from better self-knowledge.

Frameworks help you structure the thinking. But the clarity that makes a decision feel "actually pretty straightforward" usually comes from knowing what you want, what you're afraid of, and what you're willing to live with.

The best decision-makers I know aren't the ones with the most data. They're the ones who know themselves well enough to act; and honest enough to course-correct when they're wrong.

And finally, I don't believe in wrong decisions. If you made a decision and would make it again, given all the information, knowledge and experience you had at the time, you made the right decision. Even if it turned out wrong or feels wrong in hindsight. And you cannot change it anyway. So don't be sad, learn and move on.

So, what's the decision you've been sitting on?