bezos has a line that's been repeated to death, which is that you should separate decisions into two types. type one is irreversible — high-cost to undo, so you should think carefully and decide slowly. type two is reversible — easy to walk back, so you should decide fast and iterate. most people who repeat the advice get the framework right and the application completely wrong. the failure mode is consistently one direction: people treat reversible decisions like they're irreversible, and irreversible decisions like they're reversible.
the reversible-as-irreversible trap is the more common one. which programming language to learn first. which city to move to for a year. whether to try a new diet. which job to take out of three interesting ones. these are all reversible. you can quit the job, leave the city, switch the language, change the diet. but people treat them as if they're going to determine the course of their life, spend months deliberating, collect twenty opinions, build spreadsheets. the cost of the deliberation is larger than the cost of just picking wrong, because picking wrong tells you which option was right and picking slowly tells you nothing.
the irreversible-as-reversible trap is worse. taking on a cofounder. marriage. having children. selling equity in a company you founded. signing a three-year lease. taking on debt. the world is full of people who took these decisions fast, under pressure or excitement, and are now quietly paying for them for years. what makes these irreversible is usually not that they literally cannot be undone, but that the cost of undoing them is much higher than the cost of not starting. a cofounder you regret costs you equity and years. a marriage you regret costs you a divorce. a bad hire at executive level costs you a team. these are things to think slowly about.
the heuristic i use, which is just a small extension of bezos's thing. before i decide anything, i try to write down what it would cost to undo it. not the price tag — the real cost, including the reputation loss, the time loss, the psychological cost of admitting i was wrong. if that cost is small, i decide fast. if it's large, i slow down, and i usually sleep on it at least a week. the slow-down is not to think more, because more thinking does not actually improve decisions beyond a short horizon. it's to let the initial enthusiasm fade and see if the decision still seems good when i'm in a different emotional state.
a weird corollary is that the same thing can be reversible in one context and irreversible in another. moving cities at 25 is reversible. moving cities at 45 with two children in school and a mortgage is basically not. quitting a job in your first year is reversible; quitting one that made you a partner is not. this is why the "follow your passion" advice works for some people and not others. the cost of reversibility depends on how much you've committed around the thing, and most of the advice people give about decisions doesn't attend to the asymmetry.
the other pattern i keep seeing — mostly in founders — is treating the irreversible decision as irreversible, but only after it's already done. you picked the cofounder fast because you were excited about the idea. now you're two years in and the cofounder relationship is dysfunctional, and you won't end it because it would be "irreversible." which is backwards. the decision to start was irreversible-ish; the decision to continue is a fresh one you make every day. a lot of people stay in bad situations by confusing sunk cost with irreversibility. the cofounder decision cannot be un-made. the current cofounder relationship is a new decision, and the cost of ending it now is almost always smaller than the cost of continuing.
the practical thing i try to do. for reversible decisions, i have a rule: if i notice i'm deliberating more than a week, the correct answer is to just pick and reverse if necessary. the cost of the extra week of deliberation is bigger than the cost of being wrong. for irreversible decisions, i have the opposite rule: if i'm about to decide in less than a month, i force myself to wait a month. this asymmetry saves me from the two most common mistakes people make with decisions: going too slow on small things, and going too fast on big ones.
the whole framework is one paragraph of management literature that almost everyone nods at and almost nobody internalizes. if you do only one thing, do this: next time you catch yourself agonizing over something, ask what it would cost to reverse, and make the decision speed match the reversal cost. your ratio of good-to-bad decisions will, in my experience, visibly improve within a year.