Some Doors Only Open One Way
Time runs one direction and some choices cannot be undone, so learn which pushes pick the road.
When you get off a plane, there’s a spot in the airport where you walk through a door with a sign on it. No re-entry. Once you’re through, you can’t go back for the book you left on your seat. You can wave at the guard all you like. The door doesn’t care. It only opens one way.
Most of the doors in your life aren’t like that. A few are. Telling them apart is one of the most useful skills I know.
This is rule four again. Time runs one way, and some pushes pick the road. The rule page was about feeling the wobble before a fork. This letter is about what to do once you feel it. Before you push, find out what kind of door you’re standing at.
First, most doors swing both ways. Take a new job and hate it, and you can usually find another. Sign up for a class, move across town, start a habit, try a new way of doing your hair. If it goes wrong, you walk back out. These doors deserve speed, not worry. This is where rule five takes over. Find the smallest version, walk through, and let the world tell you what it thinks. Almost everyone spends some part of their life standing in front of a two-way door as if it were a one-way door, waiting to be sure. You won’t ever be sure. Waiting usually costs more than a wrong turn you can undo.
Second, a few doors only open one way. Words said in anger. A secret that wasn’t yours to tell. A big debt. Driving after drinking. Anything that hurts a body, someone else’s or your own. These deserve the opposite. Slow down. Sleep on it. Ask someone who has been through that door before. Jeff Bezos, who started Amazon, wrote about this in a letter to the people who owned his company. He called them one-way doors and two-way doors. Make the two-way kind fast, he said, and the one-way kind slowly and with care.
The hard part is that the two kinds look alike from the outside. A one-way door often looks small. A two-way door often looks huge. So ask one plain question before you push. If this goes wrong, can I walk back? If yes, go. If no, wait a day.
And not every one-way door is a danger. A kind word can’t be unsaid either. Neither can a real apology, or the first time you tell someone you love them. Those are one-way doors worth walking through on purpose.
Third, once a one-way door shuts behind you, take your hand off the handle. Something kind happens after a choice is final. Your mind quietly gets to work making the room you’re in feel like home. You can’t see it happening, and you didn’t ask for it, but it’s there. It just can’t get going while you keep trying the door.
Try this for a week.
Each evening, write down three choices you made that day, even small ones. Next to each, mark it one-way or two-way. Most will be two-way. Then pick one two-way door you’ve been standing in front of for a while and walk through it this week, in its smallest form. Send the message. Sign up for the class. Ask the question. Notice how it feels to find out instead of wonder.
One line to remember
If you can walk back, walk through. If you can’t, wait a day.
