You can’t always have what you want. My mother used to tell me that and – much as I hate to admit it – she was right. In fact, you very rarely get exactly what you want. Not when it matters. If you’re not prepared to settle for less than perfect, you may end up with nothing at all.

A friend of mine has a mother who has been trying to move house for 15 years, but won’t buy a house that doesn’t tick every single box. Unfortunately she sold her last house 15 years ago, and the money sitting in the bank (from which she has to pay out rent) has not increased in value as much as house prices have risen over that time. So in fact, it becomes harder and harder to find the perfect house because her ideal house is no longer in her price range. Not unless she moves to a different area, or has fewer bedrooms, or a smaller garden … but all those things would require compromise.

See? If you won’t compromise, it becomes ridiculously hard to make a decision at all. You need to think through the compromises you will and won’t make as part of the whole exercise. If you don’t, you can find yourself procrastinating²⁹ on a grand scale, like my friend’s mother. Often, as in her case, there’s a choice of compromises and you don’t necessarily need to make all of them.

This is another area where you have to make some room for emotions. Some compromises appear to be entirely rational, but that may be misleading. Suppose you can’t make your new business model work unless you reduce your costs. That sounds pretty unemotional, but actually, think about it. How can you reduce costs? Find a cheaper supplier, reduce quality, find premises in a cheaper area, don’t take on as many staff and work harder yourself? I think you’ll find that choosing between those compromises is going to be quite an emotional thought process.

So a whole big part of good decision making is about identifying the compromises you might need to make, working out how far you’ll compromise (maybe you’ll change careers without a salary increase, but not if it meant a drop in salary), and then choosing between the different areas of compromise. Or balancing them against each other – a small compromise here, a bigger one there.

And well before you can take the decision, you need to know your limit. What’s your bottom line – or the bottom line on each element of compromise? If you want to be happy with this decision, and with everything that flows from it in the future, what is the point you won’t go beyond? As always think it all through, and understand all your reasoning, before you commit to the final decision.