#002 How to Make Decisions When Bandwidth Is Scarce, and Stakes Are High?
A strategy born from survival not optimization.
Growing up in a country reeling from civil war, you don't learn uncertainty. You live it. Every day. Ongoing political and religious upheaval disrupts your daily life. Financial instability claws its teeth into your psyche so deeply that decisions no longer have right or wrong, because the frequency overshadows the justification.
Every choice feels like survival. You know the pressure, even if what's at stake for you is different. It's easy to get overwhelmed. To burn out. To freeze and become unable to move. And through it all, the question that holds us hostage is whether we are doing the right thing.
But what high-pressure environments often reveal are the constraints we ignore:
Decision-making is a cognitively taxing activity
Under pressure, we don’t have the luxury to invest the energy or even the bandwidth to undertake such an endeavor.
Yet instead of conserving our capacity to operate, we keep burning it by trying to perfect each decision, when reality demands a different approach.
So today, we focus on optimizing a different type of capital: the energy and bandwidth to keep moving. And it starts with something my dad, who lived through the civil war, still repeats to this day. One I internalized without even realizing it. For years, I thought it was just a survival mechanism, and in some way it probably was.
But as I look back at it now, it was so much more. Three words that outline a simple strategy holding the key to the right decisions without needing them to be right.
“Move Between The Dots”
The constraints you face are real — whatever they are. Given limited bandwidth and cognitive load, this approach prioritizes momentum over perfect decisions. It's always in motion.
Three components:
Move
Movement doesn’t come from feeling ready—it comes from leveraging whatever energy is present. Fear, anxiety, urgency, excitement—all of it creates momentum. It flows continuously because it isn’t an event you prepare for and recover from.
Between
You’re always in transit, moving through the space between decision points. There’s no “before” or “after”—only during. No right or wrong, even. You’re staying open to multiple interpretations and accepting decisions that aren't fully understood or justified.
The Dots
No “major” versus “minor” decision points. Career move, capital allocation, market entry, partnership pivot—just dots. This flattens the pressure. When there’s no inflection point, no single moment that defines everything, paralysis loses its grip. Each dot is one node in the network, not a fork that splits in two.
Why does it work?
Because you stop assuming that any decision is inherently righteous. You stop separating yourself from the flow of events, trying to stand outside them and choose “correctly.”
Control is fleeting. What feels right today becomes wrong tomorrow—and vice versa. The landscape shifts faster than your analysis can keep up.
When you stop trying to optimize each decision, you reclaim bandwidth. The pressure doesn't disappear—it redistributes. Instead of crushing you at every decision point, it flows through you as momentum. The absurdity is that we waste energy optimizing for outcomes we can't control, instead of embracing a fluid reality.
When it’s working, decisions keep happening—but decision-making disappears.
You’re not trying to nail the perfect choice. You're accepting that what you deem the wrong choice today might be exactly what you need tomorrow. And that some of the justification or rationalization you might not fully capture in that moment.
With that realization, decisions no longer feel like endings. They become openings—regenerative rather than terminal. Where each dot is a world of options, not a single inflection point.
How to maintain momentum?
The constraint is cognitive bandwidth. The question isn't just "how do I move?"—it's "what's stopping me from moving?"
These practices are diagnostic; think of them as reality checks. Each reveals where your energy drains and where your tolerance for ambiguity breaks. They help you find the aliveness in motion itself: not making the right decisions to survive, but maintaining the energy to thrive.
1. Do Nothing to Move.
Do nothing, that includes trying not to do anything. Which means you will most likely be doing something. Don’t fight it. The purpose is not to capture time to do more, but to observe where your attention drifts. Understand what’s occupying your cognitive and emotional capacity. It is a practice to almost empty yourself from “the doing” to reclaim your energy. Allow thoughts to come and go.
What it reveals: Where your energy is actually going versus where you think it's going. The gap is your leak.
2. Read or Write Poetry to Understand The Between
Living in the between means engaging with ambiguity and unclear meaning. Poetry trains you to sit with ambiguity without resolving it. It includes processing emotions faster—not by avoiding them, but by feeling them fully without needing absolute answers. If you can’t sit with that, you won’t have energy for movement.
What it reveals: Your tolerance for multiple, unresolved interpretations. If you feel compelled to find the "right" meaning or extract one definitive answer, you're still seeking certainty instead of embracing movement.
3. Zoom Out to See The Dots.
The closer you are to each decision, the more massive it feels. Zoom out. Make it a dot in a field, not THE DOT. Let go of control over how it resolves. This doesn't diminish its importance — it strips away its power to paralyze you. The pattern of moving between dots defines your trajectory, not any single decision. Don't map outcomes. Observe the dot's size relative to all others.
What it reveals: Which decisions you're unconsciously inflating. If you can't zoom out, the decision has captured too much bandwidth—you're trying to control outcomes rather than maintain momentum.
The Movement in Action
In the long term, enduring enterprises and unconventional paths compound from sustained momentum, not perfect decisions.
A friend who’s known me for almost 20 years said recently, “Your energy in keeping pushing through is commendable.” She’s witnessed my journey across oceans, multiple domain shifts, countless decisions—some that worked, many that didn’t.
And it made me realize: this is the right metric for making the right decisions. Not the outcomes. The sustained energy to maintain momentum.
Instead of being paralyzed, you're pivoting underconstraints and moving through more decisions, not fewer.
The pressure won't disappear.
The cognitive load won't lighten.
But the decisions no longer hold you hostage.
That’s The Founders Truth: Ambiguity, Absurdity, Aliveness.
And you can experience it today. What's stopping you from moving?
Have a great Sunday,
Carlo Mahfouz
P.S. Looking for poetry/prose to read? “Let the wind carry you” is my latest.
P.P.S. Struggling to know how to start — I wrote about it last week. Read.
P.P.P.S. Exploring the Self: Technology’s Role in Our Reality: I had a great conversation about this with Vjera Orbanic. Listen!
I love the imagery of this and the sense of relief that comes with thinking through this perspective