The Decision That Doesn’t Announce Itself

Recently, I heard about a young lady who was offered a kidney transplant after eighteen months on a waiting list. Surgery was set for the following week.

That same week, she had a long-planned trip booked with friends. She looked at both dates and made a decision a lot of us would understand: the trip felt urgent and irreplaceable; the surgery felt like something she could revisit later.

She went.

The match never came again.

Today she’s on dialysis three times a week, rebuilding a life around a decision she didn’t realize was final until it was.

While you may say that’s a bad call, leadership and life in general are full of moments that look like this lady’s, just lower stakes and better disguised:

1) The hard conversation with a struggling team member pushed to “next quarter.”

2) The strategic investment postponed, because the current plan feels comfortable enough.

3) The mentorship, the health check, the relationship deferred because today’s fire feels more urgent.

Most decisions are reversible.

You can course-correct, apologize, re-pitch, re-hire. But a few are not, and the danger is that reversible and irreversible decisions often feel identical in the moment.

Both show up disguised as “I’ll get to it later.”

You don’t have to get every choice right, but you have to pause and ask yourself one question before deferring anything important:

“If this window closes, does it open again, or was this the only shot?”

That single question won’t make every decision easy. But it will make you take the right ones seriously, while there’s still time to choose well.

What decisions in your life and career are you deferring?

BISOLA MOGAJI