Say it now, or wonder about it for years

On my way to the gym this morning I watched a guy litter.

He had an empty bottle. Tried to balance it on a parking meter, couldn't, and just let it drop on the sidewalk. I was across the street thinking what you'd think. What is the point of that.

Then the guy walking behind him bent down, picked it up, and put it in a trash can.

Here's the part I'm not proud of. I had been standing there narrating the problem while somebody else solved it. The bottle was twenty feet away. I have a rule about exactly this and I wasn't following it.

So when the next impulse showed up, go say thanks to that guy, I moved before I could think about it. I had to cross the street anyway. I told him thanks for picking it up, and we ended up talking for a minute about doing something instead of complaining about it, which was generous of him, considering what I'd been doing thirty seconds earlier.

The rule

I call it the seven-second rule.

When you get the impulse to do something, say the thing, ask the question, apologize, introduce yourself, you have about seven seconds before it's gone. After that your brain starts building a case, and the case always wins.

Full honesty about the number: I made it up. I like the alliteration and it makes me move. Mel Robbins built a whole book on five seconds and as far as I can tell she picked hers off a rocket launch countdown. Neither of us measured anything.

The number is arbitrary. I kept it because the window it points at holds up.

Why hesitation wins

Two findings changed how I think about this.

The first is about what hesitation actually is. Researchers who study procrastination describe it as mood repair. When a task makes you feel something unpleasant, anxiety, awkwardness, the small dread of looking stupid, delaying fixes the feeling instantly. The task is still there. The feeling is gone. Your brain just got paid.

That's why more thinking never helps in that moment. You're managing a feeling, and waiting is the fastest way to feel better right now. The bill goes to the version of you that shows up later.

The second one is harsher. Gilovich and Medvec spent years asking people about their regrets, and the pattern is consistent. In the short term people regret the things they did. Over a lifetime, they overwhelmingly regret the things they didn't do.

One reason why is the part that gets me. The concerns that stopped you at the time stop making sense later. In the moment they feel serious and specific and responsible. Years on you can't reconstruct why they mattered. The reason evaporates and the missed thing stays.

A kids' gym class in Park Slope, 2018

I took my daughter to a free gym class. Walked in, and Jason Feifer was standing there with his kid.

He's the editor in chief of Entrepreneur. I'd been following him for a long time, and I'll be honest about the level I was operating at: I used to get genuinely excited when he liked a comment I left on one of his posts. That was the relationship. He liked a comment once.

Months earlier I'd written down that I wanted to write for a publication like Entrepreneur or Forbes. So the thing I'd been aiming at was standing eight feet away holding a toddler.

And I built the case. He's with his family. It's his birthday, they're talking about where to go, you cannot interrupt a man's birthday. Maybe he'll be here next week and I'll say something then.

That's a responsible-sounding argument. It's also completely worthless, and I only know that because of what happened next.

I said five words. Hey, I like your podcast.

That turned into a conversation, then a working relationship, then a friendship, and I was writing for Entrepreneur.com that year.

He never came back to that gym class. Not the next week, not ever. I checked.

If I'd waited, that would have been the whole story. A guy I almost talked to once.

This one isn't the test

Last issue I gave you a question for the decisions you're circling. Is this hard, or is it wrong.

The fair objection: in the moment, I still can't tell.

Sometimes that's true, and that's exactly what the test is for. But plenty of the time you can tell perfectly well, and being stuck isn't what's happening. You know what to do and you're negotiating with yourself about whether to do it.

Different situations. Different tools.

If you genuinely don't know, slow down and go get evidence.

If you already know, speed is the only thing that helps. There's no framework for the email you know how to write. It doesn't need analysis. It needs to be sent.

The tell is easy. If you're constructing reasons why later would be better, you already have your answer. Later is where good impulses go to die.

The small ones are the reps

Crossing a street to thank a stranger is not a life decision. That's the point.

It cost me forty seconds. I got a good conversation, that guy will probably pick up the next bottle he sees, and Brooklyn is marginally cleaner. Nobody will ever write about it.

But it's the same muscle I used in a kids' gym class in 2018, and that one paid for a decade.

You don't get to practice on the big ones. They show up once, wearing regular clothes, usually while you're holding a diaper bag.

So take the small ones. Say the thing. Ask the question. Cross the street.

You just have to answer faster than your excuses.

Run the test on your own decision.