Bad execution of your designs does less harm than irresolution in forming them. Streams do less harm flowing than when dammed up... It needs some skill to find out difficulties, but more to find a way out of them.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
The dammed stream is the exact image: the undecided matter does not wait politely, it accumulates pressure, floods adjacent ground, and breaks out eventually somewhere worse. Teams stall around the pending call; families orbit the unmade decision for years; the option neither taken nor declined forecloses others while everyone respects the dam. The hierarchy is deliberately shocking: bad execution beats irresolution, because execution generates information and correction, while suspension generates only rot. And the portrait of the resolute is worth copying whole: they diagnose where the wedge goes, drive it, finish, and move to the next sphere, affianced to Fortune because Fortune, like everyone else, prefers dealing with people who conclude.
Practice
- Put a date on every open decision the day it opens; undated deliberation is a dam with paperwork.
- When stuck between close options, recognise the tell: near-ties mean the choice matters less than the choosing; take either and execute like it was obvious (maxim 51 already did the real filtering).
- Clear your decision backlog weekly like correspondence; ten small pending calls leak more force than one big wrong one.
Use this when
- Use this where delay is itself the expensive decision: hiring, medical consultations, exits, the conversation being postponed into a crisis.
- Use it as a leader visibly; rooms calibrate their own decisiveness to the chair's, and the dam upstream floods everyone below.
Ignore this when
- Don't confuse resolution with haste on the truly irreversible; the fifty big choices still get their written page first (maxims 35 and 51 hold that gate).
- Don't execute past discovered error to look constant; resolute includes resolutely correcting (maxim 261 buries those who don't).
A picture of it
Two brothers inherit a stalled dispute over ancestral land, already nine years old, already having eaten two weddings' worth of goodwill. The elder wants one more year of exploring options, as he has wanted annually since the beginning. The younger, finally, books the mediator, accepts a settlement both privately consider slightly unfair, and signs. The elder still narrates what a better deal might have looked like. The younger has built a house on his share. The stream, flowing at last, turned out to irrigate; dammed, it had only ever drowned Sundays.
Decide, execute, correct. The stream forgives almost everything except being dammed.