Delay | The Silver Bullet Of Better Decisions

G+D #6 | Corporate Variant #5

“..You didn’t send that, right?”

I remember the cold sweat pooling on my forehead while watching the Skype (yes, Skype) ellipses dance: “Justin is typing…”.

“Yep, I sent it to all 3 of them.”, he confirmed.

“I really don’t think you should have done that, man.”, I replied.

Only 2 years out of school, I still knew that he sent the equivalent of a corporate dueling slap. I also understood that Justin, a colleague who had more than a decade of experience, had just tarnished his reputation through an unforced error.

Justin and I were working on ramping up a huge project. We were running things like client discovery meetings, establishing communication and status check-ins, building out key project milestones and strategy, and building an initial project plan. It’s a lot of work.

And while we had large client and internal consulting teams, a much smaller crew was doing most of the work at this stage - i.e. me and Justin. Justin became angry. There were 3 other managers who had more senior leadership and management roles on the project, and Justin thought they were phoning it in - jeopardizing the start of the project. He wanted more involvement, right now.

He felt hung out to dry, over-worked, and under-appreciated. And he probably had some valid points.

So what did he do? Did he hop on the phone, calmly and clearly express key issues, his ideas for solutions, and ask for extra support and time from the other 3 managers?

L. O. L.

He did not.

One morning he woke up on the wrong side of the bed (and hungover), and decided today was the day. He was the office Thor, handing out cubicle justice with his corporate hammer.

He drafted one of the most unproductive, intentionally destructive emails that, to this day, I have ever seen. And he actually fucking sent it.

In this email he basically said the the 3 managers were:

• Lazy

• Selfish

• Bad leaders and team members

• Indifferent to the success of the project

• Putting him in a position where he may have to refuse to do any more work

To what small credit I can give him, he had the plums to send it directly to all 3 of them.

I wish I had the exact email because it was truly bonkers. Him sending it to me asking my thoughts, AFTER he sent it, might be even crazier.

This set off a network of emails and phone calls which generally had 1 tone and topic: “what the fuck is wrong with this guy?”.

Without being inside his head, I can’t say exactly what happened. Maybe it was a man who felt he was pushed too far. Maybe it was a misguided attempt to get respect. Maybe it was an effort to re-establish control.

Whatever it was, it was a mistake. And the mistake wasn’t being angry or even expressing his opinion, it was giving in to and acting on his emotions and impulses in real-time. His mistake was not questioning his own line of thinking and behavior. His mistake was giving into the worst manifestations of his thoughts on the situation.

With a few keystrokes and a single movement of his index finger, Justin permanently altered people’s perception of him. He branded himself. A grown man over a decade into his career threw a tantrum via email that had the entire team in awe of his bad decision-making.

All because he didn’t just give himself time to cool off and make a better decision.

While this situation is a highlight, the root behavior has been uncomfortably prominent throughout my career.

Suicide Via Impulse

I think Justin’s core issue was simply wanting more control over the situation - maybe his life. And I think that’s common for many of us.

Having just lived through an era labeled “The Great Resignation” and with 60% of Americans feeling emotionally detached at work, it’s easy to see a scenario where people can end up like Justin. Work is hard. Life is hard. And mounting stress and frustrations make it all too easy to buy into the dark day dreams of telling someone at work to fuck off.

But that would be giving into emotions and impulses, which is a fake solution. We feel drawn to negative or damaging behaviors because they usually make us feel good, immediately. That instant gratification is usually a great signal that it’s probably a bad move. Like thinking smoking crack will have any real impact on your reality other than…making you addicted to crack. Sure, you might feel good at first. Then, you know, everything else.

There’s no shortage of everyday examples that show emotions and impulses taking control:

• Being a dick to your romantic partner about something as stupid as the dishes (guilty)

• Watching an executive throw a tantrum and texting his main investor “So I guess we don’t work together anymore?” (witnessed this)

• Seeing someone torch a piece of their career and reputation through an unforced error over literally nothing (oh Justin)

While wishing we had acted differently is just part of existing, it’s easy to see the kind of life these behaviors can result in if left unchecked over time. They stop being forgivable moments of weakness and manifest as patterns in how we think and live.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently. - Warren Buffett

Life is a barrage of challenging scenarios designed to prey on our emotions and test our resilience. Like waves hitting a boat on open water, it’s endless. The timing and intensity are variable, but there’s always another wave about to hit.

So what can we do?

Delay.

• Take more time

• Think on it

• Do nothing

• Wait

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” - Viktor Frankl

Let’s go a step further. I don’t mean delay as just “hey stupid, don’t do that stupid thing.”. In moments where we feel our emotions bubbling, delay acts as a barrier between the immediate stimulus and our emotional default. Being able to maintain this control and awareness increases starkly in importance proportionately with how important the decision is.

As stakes are introduced - handling a tough convo with your boss, managing a team, dealing with a tough, aging parent - how you handle your emotions (and therefore influencing which outcomes occur) becomes one of the most important skills you can develop.

This is a backbone concept of emotional intelligence. And emotional intelligence is the foundation of soft skills. And soft skills are the often the separator between good and great leaders, salespeople, consultants, and professionals.

My working definition of delay: intentionally managing your immediate thoughts and questioning your emotional reactions before taking action, and/or giving yourself an extended window of time to think before taking action or making a decision.

When impulsive and emotional behavior trickles into personal relationships and business, we fail others, our companies, our teams, and ourselves. We veer our trajectory toward an unintentional path and sub-optimal outcomes.

Buffett’s right (you’re welcome, Warren), a bad emotional impulse or moment can destroy decades of effort. But I wouldn’t stop the labeling at “reputation”. You can call it your reputation, your relationship, your goals, or your business, but all areas of our lives are impacted by how we manage our emotions, impulses, and initial thoughts.

Each decision, intentional or not, leaves an imprint. In Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about the impact tiny, consistent changes have on our lives over time by comparing them to a flight pattern:

Imagine you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff - the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet - but when magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart. - James Clear, Atomic Habits

Each decision builds an increasing body of momentum behind how our lives play out. If we leave everything to emotion and impulse, by the time we get decades into our journey, we’ll be left wondering how it all happened and where it all went wrong.

Taking Time = More Ways To Win

What delay really gives us is 2 things:

• The natural ability for our perspective to change

• Time to do more research and thinking

Even if you never do an ounce of research or deep thinking for a decision (or ‘reaction’), letting a little extra time pass will reinforce or change your perspective.

Ever have a moment where you freak out, only for hours to go by and you think back, not even knowing why you cared at all?

That is an everyday insight that shows how a simple pause - a moment to think or simply refrain from action - can lead us to a better outcome and avoid the consequences of letting the whim of our feelings lead how we act. It’s also a window into the insight that our emotions heavily alter our state of being, so we can’t use those alone as guides for our belief systems or decision-making templates.

Emotions are signals, not mandates.

The greatest remedy for anger is delay. - Seneca

Delay remedies far more than just anger. Time cuts through emotions and impulses the way water cuts through stone. It just takes a little while.

To be clear - I’m not saying each decision has to be a big, drawn out production. You shouldn’t look like the thinker every time you’re trying to pick which place to grab coffee. It’s just an important cue to break cycles of:

1. Letting our emotions cause us to do stupid, stupid shit

2. Giving us a wide surface area of opportunity to change our behavior, and therefore our lives

The extent of how long you delay - the breathing room you give yourself - will vary. You might be deciding between 1 second, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, or 1 month for any given decision. The point is to be intentional. That flash of annoyance that happens in a millisecond, well maybe with 1 additional intentional second, you can be the boyfriend you really want to be. Or maybe in 1 day, you’ll realize you don’t want that promotion, you want a new job.

It’s a mechanism to avoid stupidity, and to provide a window to strengthen intentionality.

The concept of delay makes me think of psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his rule for when people ask him for things. Shane Parrish talks about how Kahneman, with his body of knowledge and established success, receives a lot of requests. So he tells people that he has a rule he never says yes on the phone and will get back to them tomorrow. He does this to avoid the social pressure that comes with someone asking for help and his own natural inclination be a people pleaser, which both instinctively push him to say yes to any request.

His rule showcases 3 critical lessons:

• Delay gives you more time to consider a decision

• Delay shields you from in-the-moment emotions and social pressures

• Real-time decision-making is disadvantageous positioning; you rarely have to answer on the spot

There are few skills, cues, or life strategies that have had a bigger impact on my life than delay. Simply taking time to get a better handling on my emotions, a better understanding of myself, and think through decisions and actions has allowed me to fundamentally and intentionally change my life.

I’ve had dozens of moments in my career where I thought conformity and immediacy were the only valuable elements of a decision. If I did what was asked and did it quickly, I was a winner and would be rewarded. Everyone around me was happy to reinforce this mindset.

But the most rewarding choices in my life have come from tough conversations, discomfort, and challenging my default behavior and way of thinking. Things like asking for a deadline I can make a decision by, bringing a written agenda and sheet of notes when negotiating a promotion, and being willing (respectfully) go against the grain if I thought it would lead to a better outcome for a client, my company, or myself - have all been rewarding moments of growth. They’ve been opportunities to level up as a person.

And they all originated from created tiny windows of space, a delay, between what was happening and the course of action I ultimately decided to take.

Delaying Nuclear Annihilation

In 1983, a single Soviet solider may have prevented global nuclear war.

On 26 September 1983, during the Cold War, the Soviet nuclear early warning system Oko reported the launch of one intercontinental ballistic missile with four more missiles behind it, from the United States. Petrov, suspecting a false alarm, decided to wait for a confirmation that never came. According to the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the UN, nuclear retaliation requires that multiple sources confirm an attack. In any case, the incident exposed a serious flaw in the Soviet early warning system. Petrov has said that he was neither rewarded nor punished for his actions.

Had Petrov reported incoming American missiles, his superiors might have launched an assault against the United States, precipitating a corresponding nuclear response from the United States. Petrov declared the system's indication a false alarm. Later, it was apparent that he was right: no missiles were approaching and the computer detection system was malfunctioning. It was subsequently determined that the false alarm had been created by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds above North Dakota and the Molniya orbits of the satellites, an error later corrected by cross-referencing a geostationary satellite.

Petrov later indicated that the influences on his decision included that he had been told a US strike would be all-out, so five missiles seemed an illogical start; that the launch detection system was new and, in his view, not yet wholly trustworthy; that the message passed through 30 layers of verification too quickly; and that ground radar failed to pick up corroborating evidence, even after minutes of delay. However, in a 2013 interview, Petrov said at the time he was never sure that the alarm was erroneous. He felt that his civilian training helped him make the right decision. He said that his colleagues were all professional soldiers with purely military training and, following instructions, would have reported a missile launch if they had been on his shift.

I mean did you fucking read that. You can’t control yourself when you want to send a pissy email or be mean to a co-worker, but Stanislav Petrov could stare the apocalypse in the eyes, ignore his orders, and calmly decide to do nothing? He didn’t potentially stop World War 3, he may have prevented Fallout 3.

There’s a common misconception that Petrov could have launched a retaliatory strike. That is not true. However, he could have communicated to his superior officer that there were confirmed missiles inbound from the US. Then it would be up to his superior on how to respond, again, to the threat of annihilation during the Cold War.

Petrov delayed. He took time to think about the scenario, control his emotions, and think logically in a situation where seconds literally mean life or death. He understood the potential implications of his decision, and despite his orders and training, he waited until he had more information.

It was an irreversible decision with the world at stake. It was too much to leave up to the emotions of survival or the impulses of military training alone.

**

Justin should have delayed. He fired a tactical nuke over the proverbial water to prove a point. Like Buffett points out, Justin’s reputation was damaged. As long as I worked with him, it was never the same.

Crazier still, I remember coming into the office a few days later and seeing Justin in a side conference room with one of the managers he sent the note too. Yet again, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the body language said it all: Justin was doubling down.

Through a pane glass window, I saw the manager sitting, arms crossed, red-faced, nodding - letting Justin have his moment. Where was Justin? Pacing back and forth across the room, waving his arms around, and, seemingly, yelling.

He was giving into his emotions all over again. He was going full Costanza - full KoKo.

Be like Petrov, not Justin.

Delay.

Take time to make better decisions.

Take time to be the person you want to be.

With Love/Paranoia,

Nick