Permission to be Wrong About What You Want
When overwhelm hits, I default to the coffee table — Midori notebook open flat, Frixion pens in hand. I sketch mindmaps, draw arrows, erase, redraw. It feels like clarity, but it’s just forward-looking theatre.
There’s a particular violence in sitting cross-legged on the floor, sorting through possibilities like a child with scattered marbles.
I tell myself I’m being thorough, responsible, strategic. But I’ve done it enough times to recognise, I’m lying: I’m not deciding — just performing the idea of decision-making. And most of us could teach a masterclass in it.
We choreograph our own paralysis. Every variable becomes another marble to count — another reason to stay seated while the world moves on. It's not thinking. It's hiding.
I watch people spend years deciding whether to leave their job, whether to have children, whether to move cities. They collect data like amulets against uncertainty. They make spreadsheets. They consult friends who haven't made the choice themselves. They mistake the accumulation of considerations for wisdom, when what they're really accumulating is reasons to stay exactly where they are.
The café dweller with fifteen browser tabs open, toggling between their home’s Zestimate, job boards, and personality tests — that's many of us, most of the time. We think we’re researching a new life, but really we’re just microdosing courage to avoid the full dose of actually choosing. And when the moment passes, we launch into the debrief, explaining to anyone who'll listen how complicated the decision was, how many factors needed consideration.
But here's what nobody wants to hear: the quality of a choice isn't determined by the deliberation that preceded it. It's created by what you do afterward. The job becomes good or bad based on how you work, not how carefully you weighed the salary against the commute. The relationship deepens or dissolves based on how you love, not how perfectly you matched.
We've convinced ourselves that we lack information when what we actually lack is permission. Permission to choose badly. Permission to learn by failing. Permission to be wrong about what we want and course-correct later.
Readiness is another marble we use to delay the inevitable — that life happens in the doing, not in the preparing to do.
The teenager who won't clean his room doesn't need a manual on cleaning. He needs to want a clean room more than he wants to rebel against cleaning it. The aspiring speaker who's spent years wondering "how to start" doesn't need another book on public speaking. She needs to admit she's more interested in the idea of being a presenter than in the vulnerability of giving a public talk.
This is where it gets uncomfortable: most of what we think we don't know how to do, we actually don't want to do. Not enough. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
The people who seem to have some secret knowledge about success, about relationships, about creativity — they're not doing anything mysterious. They're just doing. While others are still on the floor, sorting uncertainties, they’re already out there — making mistakes, adjusting course, making more mistakes, getting better.
You can spend your whole life becoming an expert at consideration. Or you can give yourself permission to be spectacularly wrong about what you want. To choose the job that instructs you what you actually hate. To move to the city that shows you where you don't belong. To start the relationship that ends badly but changes how you love.
Being wrong about what you want is not a failure of planning. It's proof you're finally deciding to live.
The real mistake isn't being wrong about what you choose. It's never choosing at all.