So you can’t wait for perfect data. It doesn’t exist. You just have to take that first step into the unknown. Combine everything you’ve learned and take your best guess at what’s going to happen next. That’s what life is. Most decisions we make are data-informed, but they’re not data-made.

The interesting thing is that delayed intuition generally doesn’t make it less scary. If anything, the more you understand it, the more butterflies in your stomach it’ll give you. Because you’ll uncover all the ways it can go wrong; you’ll know the million things that might kill this idea and your business and your time.

But knowing what can kill you makes you stronger.

And knowing that you’ve already deflected some major bullets makes you stronger still.

Two psychologists quibbled. Amos Tversky and Eldar Shafir later published a paper proving that the “sure-thing principle” wasn’t always a sure thing. They uncovered situations where the mere existence of uncertainty seemed to alter how people made decisions—even when the uncertainty was irrelevant to the outcome, as with the businessman’s purchase.

In retrospect, the erosion seen in the engineer’s Champlain Towers South inspection seems a clear signal of imminent collapse—but at the time it was undeniably ambiguous. Ambiguous threats are problematic because of the natural human tendency to downplay them. It’s natural, and more pleasant, to assume nothing’s wrong and to adopt a wait-and-see attitude. Perhaps you’ve heard of confirmation bias-our tendency to see what we expect, thereby reinforcing an existing belief or prediction by paying attention to confirming data and failing to notice disconfirming data. Becoming more self-aware, as you will see in the next chapter, is one element of learning to notice early warnings—and to actively seeking disconfirming data, just in case. But it’s natural to adopt a wait-and-see attitude instead of getting curious and taking a closer look at some subtle signal of irregularity. The financial industry turned a collective blind eye to the risk of mortgage-backed securities, composed of shaky loans granted to people with neither assets nor income to ensure repayment.

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.