There's a saying attributed to Mark Twain that I love.
"If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning."
The idea being that once you've done the worst thing on your list, nothing else in your day can touch it.
Simple concept. And yet most of us have a frog sitting somewhere on our list right now that we've been quietly ignoring for days, weeks, or in some cases months.
I want to talk about that frog. Not just because avoiding it feels uncomfortable, but because avoiding it has a very real cost, and most of the time, we're not adding that cost up.
Delay isn't neutral
There's a common belief that putting off a tough decision is a form of patience. That you're gathering more information, waiting for the right moment, keeping your options open.
Sometimes that's true. But there's a point where waiting stops being strategic and starts being avoidance and once you've crossed that line, you're paying for it whether you realise it or not.
That cost shows up in different ways.
It might be financial. A decision that needed to be made about a product line, a supplier contract, a team member who isn't performing. Every day you don't make it, money keeps going in the wrong direction.
It might be momentum. The team that's waiting on a decision from you before they can move forward. The opportunity that had a window, and the window is closing.
Most often, it's morale. People can tell when their leader is avoiding something. They don't always know what it is, but they feel the ambiguity, and ambiguity breeds anxiety in a way that a clear, difficult decision rarely does.
The thing that makes it harder
Most tough decisions aren't intellectually complicated. If you're honest with yourself, you usually know what needs to happen. What you're avoiding isn't the decision itself, it's the discomfort of delivering it.
The conversation that will be hard. The reaction you can't predict. The relationship that might not survive it. The version of yourself who has to be the one to say the thing that no one wants to hear.
This is why leadership can be genuinely lonely. Because eventually, all roads lead back to you. You can seek input, consult your advisers, workshop it with your team, but ultimately the call is yours. And so is the discomfort that comes with it.
What I've learned, over more than 25 years of making decisions I really didn't want to make, is that the discomfort doesn't disappear with delay, it compounds. The longer you wait, the heavier it gets.
What the frog looks like in practice
The tough decisions that tend to get avoided the longest are almost always one of these:
• The team member who's been underperforming for longer than you want to admit. You've had the informal conversations, you've given the benefit of the doubt, and still nothing has shifted. Every week you don't act, the rest of the team are watching and drawing their own conclusions about what you're prepared to tolerate.
• The product, service, or strategy that isn't working. You were excited about it, and maybe you backed it publicly. Walking away from it feels like admitting failure, but continuing to resource something that isn't delivering is a choice too, and it's often the more expensive one.
• The partnership or supplier relationship that's past its use-by date. The discomfort of that conversation keeps getting outweighed by the effort of having it.
• The difficult feedback that someone genuinely needs to hear. Maybe it's a board member, a co-founder, a senior leader. The longer it goes unsaid, the more entrenched the behaviour becomes, and the harder the eventual conversation gets.
How to actually eat the frog
Here's a few things that have helped me move through tough decisions rather than around them.
Make sure you have the facts you actually need, not every fact that exists. There's a difference between gathering the information required to make a good decision and using information-gathering as a delaying tactic. Set yourself a deadline for when the decision gets made, and hold to it.
Separate the decision from the delivery. Sometimes they feel like the same thing, which makes the whole thing feel impossible. Work out what you've actually decided first. Then think about how you'll communicate it. They're two separate tasks.
Acknowledge the cost of waiting, in real terms. Ask yourself: what is this decision costing me per week that I don't make it? Sometimes making that number concrete is enough to break the inertia.
Deliver it with clarity and compassion. Being decisive doesn't mean being cold. The goal is a clear message delivered with genuine respect for the impact it will have. People can absorb difficult news delivered well. What they struggle to forgive is being strung along, or finding out you knew for months before you told them.
Your people are watching
Every time you make a hard call, own it, and move forward with clarity, you build something with your team that's very hard to manufacture any other way. Trust.
And every time you don't, you chip away at it.
Your team will never expect you to get every decision right. They will notice whether you have the courage to make the hard ones.
So if you've got a frog on your list right now, you already know what I'm going to say.
Eat it first thing in the morning.
This topic is something I dig into deeply in Lesson 11 of Ready to Rise, including a worksheet that walks you through how to structure and prepare for the tough decisions you know you need to make. If you're not yet in the community, here's the link.
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