You win by making the right move. You make the right move by waiting for it.
Before my jaw surgery in 2018, I made too many moves.
I underwent a sleep study at a facility that allowed me to sleep on my stomach. Obstructive sleep apnea is positional. Bad medical care.
A dentist prescribed an oral appliance and lied to me about its potential side effects. I wore it. The side effects were bad.
A surgeon told me I’d need to fix my deviated septum, so I might as well do it now. Unnecessary surgery. I’d later have maxillomandibular advancement, which would necessitate a septum fix at that point anyway. I had mis-sequenced, again due to bad advice from doctors.
Six doctors mis-diagnosed or mis-treated me before I found the world’s expert in obstructive sleep apnea. Not himself a surgeon, he sent me to the only surgeon he liked. I had the surgery. It went wonderfully.
One quality move would have saved me ten years and six bad doctors, one bad surgery, and one damaging oral appliance.
I had an insufficient respect for quality.
A friend has spent the last decade on a large legal case about a contract violation. Ten years, about ten moves. He says most of his days are spent staring at a wall thinking. The hardest part hasn’t been any single move. It’s been the waiting between them — the part where you’re not doing anything visible.
It’s easy to get antsy. But the right move at the wrong time is the wrong move. And the wrong move, just to do something is even worse.
That’s not laziness. That’s respect for quality.
Recently, two optometrists told me I should get corneal crosslinking. The pattern-matching said I needed it. Something didn’t smell right.
So I went to the actual experts — the ones who’ve seen thousands of patients who look like me over the past thirty years and done seven hundred-plus surgeries on people with my eyes.
At the end of this month, I’m flying to France to install permanent contacts. The pattern-matchers were wrong. The real experts were right. The move they suggested would have been unnecessary.
Refusing a move is also a move. Sometimes it’s the best move.
When I started freelancing, I asked everyone for client referrals. I had to. I didn’t know who would say yes, what worked, what my rate was, or who my buyer was. This was the explore phase. More information was better.
By my third set of clients, the machine started carrying itself. My hourly rate was higher than many lawyers’. Inbound exceeded what I wanted.
The shift on calls was exponential. I had good pre-call materials. I had good post-call follow-ups. The call itself was mostly listening and repeating back what the client had said.
One call, I was sitting at a kitchen table on mute, pulling funny faces while my then-partner pointed at the phone whisper-yelling, “Pay attention! Focus!” The client stopped talking. I unmuted. I said five words. I re-muted. The client said, “Wow, you really get it!” Then-partner was floored.
I would tell early-Julian to keep investing in the process. And not to abandon it when he got tired of it — to keep investing, just in a new way. The work shifts from doing more to doing fewer, better. Respect the elegance.
Flailing is not testing.
When I hired my contractor, I went for volume — got fifteen quotes, narrowed them down. The cost of each one coming by was low — just some of my time — so I figured why not. But I wasn’t systematic. A bit more research upfront — learning how the process works, what the categories of contractor are, what the right questions to ask are — would have produced a faster result with fewer visits.
Getting a lot of information systematically is a research strategy. Getting a lot of information randomly is flailing. The two feel similar from inside. They aren’t.
Closing on this apartment took eight months. The required topics ranged from negotiation to financing to weird legal processes to printing documents at 11 PM in rural France. About ten major moves in total.
Once the incentives were aligned — me, my broker, the seller’s broker — the rest clicked pretty smoothly. The eight months were spent making the right moves slowly, not many moves quickly. And about half of the key moves were me saying no to other people’s requests. At least two of those would have ruined the deal.
It’s not about doing less. It’s about doing fewer, where each one is more elegant. Build the system that reduces the steps. Invest in infrastructure. Make the right move when the right move presents itself.
If “fewer” ever becomes zero, that’s a different problem. This approach won’t fix that one. But it does need fixing.
Life is full of games. Games require moves. Don’t do less. Do fewer.
Julian Wise 