When Your Strength Can't Scale
What slowing down to reflect taught me about moving fast
A friend told me recently they admire how quickly I make decisions. I thanked them. Then spent three days wondering if I actually know what I’m doing.
I make decisions fast. Always have. Restaurant choices, career moves, business strategy - I am rarely stuck in analysis paralysis, I bias towards action. While other people are still gathering data and weighing their options, I’ve already picked a direction, placed a stake in the ground, and started.
That quality served me well. I made it to VP. Projects moved forward. Things got done.
But here’s what I’m realizing now: I never actually thought about why I was doing it. I just did it. And looking back, that gap limited me in ways I didn’t see at the time.
I couldn’t effectively delegate high-stakes decisions because I couldn’t explain my process. I couldn’t scale my judgment through my team because I didn’t understand my own judgment well enough to teach it. I advanced anyway—maybe luck, maybe timing, maybe I had enough other things going for me.
But it could have been easier and I could have made my teams even stronger.
I’m finally doing the reflection work I should have done years ago. And what I’m discovering is both humbling and useful.
What Reflection Is Revealing
A friend’s compliment pushed me to do something I’d been neglecting for years: actually examine how I make decisions.
So I gave myself an assignment. For two weeks, I documented every significant decision:
What did I decide?
How long did it take?
What made me feel ready to move?
What was I weighing without realizing it?
At first, it felt ridiculous. Like trying to explain how to breathe.
But after ten days, something unexpected emerged.
The Three Modes I Didn’t Know I Was Using
I wasn’t just “making fast decisions.” I was switching between three completely different approaches depending on the situation:
Mode 1: Low-Stakes Experimentation
Low-cost decisions that are easy to reverse. I move fast because the cost of being wrong is minimal and the value of learning quickly is high.
Example: Choosing a restaurant—scan reviews, check location and dietary options, decide in 30 seconds. If it’s bad, we don’t go back. The goal is to try something and learn, not to make the perfect choice.
When I use it: Testing new approaches, trying options where failure is cheap and informative.
The risk: Using this mode when stakes are actually higher than I think.
Mode 2: Values-Based Clarity
High-stakes decisions where my priorities are non-negotiable. I move fast not because stakes are low, but because I have absolute clarity on what matters.
Example: I turned down well-paid work recently in under a minute because I knew I didn’t have time to deliver work that met my standards. Once I determined I couldn’t meet my bar for excellence, there was nothing left to decide. Reputational risk isn’t worth any fee.
When I use it: Decisions that touch core values and ethical lines.
The risk: Moving decisively based on your values when others may not share them and you haven’t built alignment first.
Mode 3: Pattern Recognition
Decisions based on situations that feel familiar from past experience. I move fast because I think I’ve seen this before.
Example: I gave advice to a colleague based on what seemed like a similar situation I’d handled. Except when I thought harder about it, the context of the organization I was in was a little different. It just felt familiar enough.
When I use it: Leveraging experience to move efficiently through known territory.
The risk: Moving fast on pattern-matching that’s actually just familiarity, not lived experience.
What I Wish I’d Known Earlier
Here’s what’s becoming clear: I was treating all three modes the same way. Fast decision, done, move on. I thought speed was the skill. Turns out, knowing when and how to be fast was the actual skill.
Which meant:
I couldn’t delegate effectively. When I sent someone to handle a high-stakes situation, they didn’t know which mode to use. Should they experiment and iterate? Hold firm on standards? Trust their pattern recognition? I never told them because I didn’t consciously know I was switching modes.
I couldn’t explain my thinking to executives. When I made recommendations, I couldn’t articulate the sophistication of what I was doing. It just looked like I moved fast—not that I was making calculated choices about when to move fast and why.
I couldn’t develop my team’s judgment. They could watch me work, but they couldn’t learn from me. Because I had nothing to teach except “trust your gut”—which is useless advice.
I advanced anyway. But I could have been so much more effective if I’d understood this earlier.
Why This Matters for You
Here’s the counterintuitive part: examining your strengths might be what unlocks your next level.
Not fixing your weaknesses. Not working harder. But understanding what you already do well enough to make it teachable, delegatable, scalable. Systematize your strength.
Because at a certain point in your career, success isn’t about being good at your job. It’s about building others who can be good at it too. Teaching others to build requires making the thought process visible. And you can’t make something visible that you haven’t examined yourself.
What You Can Do Starting This Week
For the next two weeks, document 10 significant decisions:
What did you decide?
How long did it take?
Which mode were you using? (Low-stakes experimentation, values-based clarity, or pattern recognition)
What would someone else need to know to make this same call?
Then look for patterns:
When do you move fast for good reasons vs. out of habit?
What are your actual non-negotiables vs. what you say they are?
When is your pattern-matching solid vs. just familiar?
What context are you assuming others have that they don’t?
Then start practicing articulation:
In your next important meeting, try naming your framework out loud:
“This is a low-stakes situation where we can test and iterate quickly.”
“This touches our brand standards, which aren’t negotiable—so there’s really no decision to make.”
“This feels like the X situation we saw last year, but I want to pressure-test whether it’s actually the same pattern.”
Watch what happens. You’ll sound more strategic. Not because you’re thinking differently, but because you’re making the sophistication of your thinking visible.
The Bottom Line
I made it to VP without doing this work. But I could have scaled my impact more and developed even stronger teams.
You probably already have strengths that could take you further. Natural abilities that have served you well.
But if you can’t articulate how you do what you do, you’ll hit a ceiling. You can’t delegate what you can’t explain. You can’t scale what you don’t understand. You can’t develop others to do what you can only perform intuitively.
The clarity you gain won’t just help you understand yourself better. It’ll change how you lead, how you delegate, and how far you can go.
Two weeks. Ten decisions. Document them.
This is a great framework for decision making. Definitely going to give it a try.