Your company is an organism; its cells need to divide to multiply, they need to differentiate to become something new. Don’t worry about what you’re going to lose—think about what you’re going to become.

If you don’t know whether you passed or failed, you … wait and see? This is not the way the “sure-thing principle” is supposed to behave. It’s as if our businessman had decided to wait until after the election to buy his property, despite being willing to make the purchase regardless of the outcome.

Tversky and Shafir’s study shows us that uncertainty—even irrelevant uncertainty—can paralyze us.

The key is to remember that imagined choices don’t actually exist, because they’re not actionable. We’re not trying to live a fantasy life; we’re trying to design a real and livable life. If we burdened ourselves with knowing everything about our decisions and discovering every option possible (which, of course, you should do if you’re going to make “the best choice”), we’d never decide. In life design we know that there are countless possibilities but aren’t stymied by that fact. We revel in exploring a few possibilities, then taking action by starting with a choice.

Even when we get the big decisions directionally right, we’re not guaranteed to get the results we want.

We don’t think of ordinary moments as decisions. No one taps us on the shoulder as we react to a comment by a coworker to tell us that we’re about to pour gasoline or water onto this flame.

The best models will always fail at some point. CEOs must combine information with intuition in decision-making. They must deploy informed intuition. This is not simply going with one’s gut. A good definition of informed intuition is “the process of blending existing information and data with one’s experiences, educated assumptions, and instincts to arrive at a logical conclusion.” Relying on it is always important, but it becomes even more so in the second year, as you’re moving further out from the initial assessment of your strategic agenda. Informed intuition also requires taking the people component into account. Call it the social side of strategy: marrying the people and performance components. Numbers and analysis and logic only get you so far when you are in the fog of war.