The Cost of Inaction

Daily writing prompt

Write about a time when you didn’t take action but wish you had. What would you do differently?

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The one time I wanted to buy Bitcoin at $1 and didn’t. I made a mistake.

I believe it’s usually better to make a wrong decision than to not make any decision.

For example, I didn’t have access to a PC until I was about 17. As a result, I made an uninformed decision when choosing a university and ended up studying accounting. I got my first computer for my first year there. By the third year, it became painfully obvious that I had made a mistake because my entire life revolved around Internet but it felt too late to switch because I was close to graduation (it was 4.5 years in total). Do I regret it? Not really. I took a wide range of courses in accounting, finance, financial control, math, statistics, marketing. Years later, I applied again to another university and studied the right thing. Looking back, that bachelor’s in accounting turned out to be surprisingly valuable in my software engineering career.

But the post is about the cost of inaction. Here are some points:

• Both in personal and professional life, if there’s a problem and you don’t address it, it gets worse
• We’re more likely to regret the things we didn’t do than the mistakes we made trying
• If you don’t do that thing, the competition may do it first, and better
• Fear rots our brains. We rarely fear inaction. We fear action and change

Rather than a summary, have this encouraging look by the little Song thrush.