I spent twenty minutes today trying to decide which gym location to transfer to. Central or Kowloon? Should I ask my recruiter where the client office is? But what if the assignment changes?
Then I realised: I was trying to optimise a decision I didn’t have enough information to make. The right move was to ask my gym for pricing on all locations and decide later.
This pattern shows up everywhere. We narrow too early because narrowing feels like progress. “Should I learn React or Vue?” when you haven’t built anything yet. “Should I target banks or insurers?” when you haven’t talked to either. The question itself is premature.
When you don’t have enough information to narrow, stop narrowing. Cast the wide net. Ask for all options. Gather the full price list. The information that lets you narrow will come from doing, not from deliberating.
The cost of asking for too much information is near zero. The cost of optimising on insufficient data is a decision you’ll need to redo.