Newcastle’s first grand final in 25 years, and I watched it from a beer garden in Albury.
I’ve lived in Newcastle my whole life. I remember the last one, when the Knights won and a fair portion of the town went a little crazy. It was one of those moments where civic pride rises and we all happily lose the plot just a little.
So naturally, this was the year we booked a driving holiday through Victoria. We watched the preliminary final in Batemans Bay and the grand final in the Beer Garden of the Boomerang Hotel in Albury, while our feeds filled up with our town turning red and blue without us.
(I can’t write this without saying it: the Roosters deserved the win. But to be hit by wave after wave of quality attack, with next to no ball and no field position, and lose 19–18? Wow. Superb effort and courage from the Knights. Right, I’m done.)
My civic pride is not the point. The point is FOMO, the Fear Of Missing Out. Or in our case, since the missing out was already locked in, DOMO: the Disappointment Of Missing Out.
One of the best-documented quirks of the brain is loss aversion. A loss hurts roughly twice as much as the same-sized win feels good. Losing $10 stings about as much as finding $20 pleases. It makes evolutionary sense. If you spent the effort and took the risk to hunt or gather something, you’d want to be motivated not to lose it.
The trouble is the brain isn’t fussy about what counts as a loss. “I could have been…” counts. Economists call it opportunity cost: doing one thing costs you the chance to do another. That’s what making a decision means.
That matters, because you cannot move towards something without walking away from something else. Every yes comes with a pile of no’s attached. Ten days in a car with my family meant not being in Newcastle. Taking the role means not taking the other one. Strategy is mostly about what you decide not to do, and that’s as true of a life as it is of a business.
So the walking away is built in, and the thing we are walking away from might be good, or fun, or valuable.
Leaders often get stuck right here. Not because they don’t know what they want to walk towards, but because walking towards it means walking away from something else they value.
They want both and end up with neither.
For the record, our DOMO twinge was fleeting, whilst it would have been fun, we valued our trip and time together far more.
Is there a decision in front of you that isn’t between good and bad, but between two good options? And is sitting on the fence preventing traction towards either?
