What Is the Answer Isn't Ready Yet?

By the end of last week, I would have paid good money for someone to just tell me what to do. I knew I’d hit my limit when I started daydreaming about working at a grocery store or a Starbucks, somewhere I could clock in, do the thing, and clock out.

I didn’t need advice, exactly. I wanted instructions. Do this first, do it like this, then do this. I think my leader’s brain was just tired.

I had two or three decisions sitting in front of me. Thursday and Friday came and went with nothing resolved. My creative brain was running hot, which somehow made it worse.

When you’re building something, the version of you who would know what to do here doesn’t exist yet. You’re deciding your way into becoming her. The ground you used to stand on has shifted, and what you’re standing on now isn’t solid yet. So you look outside yourself for stability.

And plenty of people are happy to sell it. Everyone has a framework and a promise. Follow my steps, get my result. Add that fuel to the fire and now I’m a real mess, going for a walk.

Building something can feel lonely and heavy this way. It’s exciting too, but nobody warns you how much of it is just you, alone with the weight of choices nobody else can make for you.

So I was stuck. And it wasn’t because any of those decisions were impossible, it was more because I wanted the discomfort of not-knowing to end, and picking something, anything, would end it.

That is different than being ready to choose.

Sometimes we make a decision because we’re ready to decide. Sometimes we make a decision because we’re no longer willing to feel undecided. From the inside, those two feel almost identical.

And that gap doesn’t shrink as you get more senior. It widens. If you lead, your whole value is turning messy situations into a direction people can move on. People bring you the tangle precisely because you’re the one who makes the call. So sitting in “I don’t know yet” doesn’t just feel uncomfortable, it feels like failing at the thing you’re supposed to be good at.

Decision science even has a term for part of our discomfort here: ambiguity aversion, our tendency to prefer situations where the probabilities are known over those where they aren’t.

Which creates an interesting problem for leaders. What happens when your job increasingly requires you to make decisions precisely where the probabilities aren’t known?

My tired founder brain on a Friday and a CEO’s brain in a boardroom are reaching for the same relief: make the not-knowing stop.

There is a really interesting study out of Stanford by Brown, Gagnon and Wagner, 2020. They trained people to navigate virtual towns until a set of routes was second nature, then sent them toward a destination that could be reached faster by a shortcut they’d never taken. Two groups: one navigated under stress, warned they might get a mild shock along the way, the other with no such warning. A stressed group and an unstressed group.

The unstressed group figured out the shortcuts. The stressed group didn’t, they fell back on the longer, familiar routes they already knew, even though a better path was right there.

The interesting part for leadership isn’t that stress made this group incapable of navigating. It changed how they navigated. They were less likely to identify and use a new possibility and more likely to rely on the route they already knew.

That narrowing of options feels like experience. It feels like instinct and knowing what you’re doing. And it leads to decisiveness, taking control and moving everyone towards action. It looks like leadership.

When you decide something, you feel it in your body. The ambiguity lifts and the team can move. Your brain gets to stop holding competing futures at once and shift into action, and that often feels like relief. That doesn’t mean it was the right decision. It might just be the missed shortcut from the study above.

Don’t confuse the discomfort of an unresolved decision with evidence that the decision is ready to be made.

To be fair, sometimes the pressure lifts because you landed on a good call. But relief isn’t proof of anything. It’s a feeling that shows up the moment the not-knowing ends, whether or not the decision was the best one.

Back to my weekend. Once I noticed what I was doing, wanting the not-knowing to stop more than I wanted the best answer, something loosened.

I’d been treating each decision as one big, final thing I had to lock in right then. But most of them weren’t. I was compressing a whole sequence of future choices into a single call I thought I had to make now. When I actually looked, the real question was smaller.

What actually needs to be decided this weekend? The answer was nothing. So I breathed some space into things, and I’m coming back to a fresh week feeling a bit more grounded, in a better place to notice the shortcut.

I’ve been reading about “liminality” or thresholds in Celtic tradition. Doorways, shorelines, dusk, the turn of a season. Places that sit between one state and the next and are treated as real places in their own right, not just gaps to rush through.

Modern work has no patience for that. But when you’re in that gap, it helps to understand it. The instinct is usually: what’s the answer, what’s the plan, what’s the action to get out of here?

But a threshold is a beautiful place sometimes. Maybe the conditions haven’t finished forming. Maybe the information hasn’t fully arrived. Standing in the in-between for a beat isn’t indecision. It can be the most honest place to be until the shortcut comes into view.

None of this is a case for sitting on your hands. Speed is often great leadership, waiting has its own cost, and plenty of decisions are small or reversible enough that the fastest way to learn is to just move. The point isn’t to wait longer. It’s to know why you’re moving: because it’s time, or because you couldn’t stand the not-knowing.

So I have a new post-it on my desk which asks “Am I resolving the problem, or resolving my discomfort with the problem?”

Then three smaller checks under it.

1- Timing. What actually changes if I don’t decide this today?

2- Information. Is there something I could reasonably discover that would change my answer? If yes, waiting has a purpose. If no, more analysis is probably just another way to procrastinate or avoid the not-knowing.

3- State. If this decision were suddenly made for me, what would I feel first? Relief? Disappointment? Excitement? None of those feelings gives me the answer, but each gives me another piece of information about what might be driving it.

Growth hands us decisions we don’t yet have the identity to make. It’s the actual shape of building something. The work is learning to tell the difference between a decision that’s ready and a discomfort that’s just gotten loud, and having the nerve to stay at the threshold until the shortcut comes into view.